The seventeenth volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, The Rover completes all the major novels with the exception of Chance, The Arrow of Gold, and the two longest, The Rescue and Nostromo. This Cambridge Edition – with its even smaller readership – will not alter this state of affairs, but it actually has within it material enough that might at least make The Rover somewhat more central in the academic study of Conrad. Despite some more sustained attention this century (for instance from Hugh Epstein, Katherine Baxter, Claude Maisonnat, and Andrea White), The Rover has not radically altered its place as – if read at all – a novel of which some readers are rather indulgently fond. To take two instances significant for their close attention to Conrad’s art of writing, and for their own academic status: Jakob Lothe’s Conrad’s Narrative Method (1989) accords The Rover a single, dismissive comment (“lengthy, rather monotonous and not very exciting” (132)), while Jeremy Hawthorn, in his Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment of the following year, does not find the novel interesting enough to warrant a mention. That initial success has not been translated into commensurate critical consideration. The inflated puffs for the Christmas 1923 market that helped to make it so are illustrated within, along with much else that makes this new edition welcome. The Rover was Conrad’s last completed novel, a “popular success on publication,” as the jacket note for this edition tells us. Stape, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2018) lviii + 533 pp. The Rover, edited by Alexandre Fachard and J. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad Society (UK) - The Conradian
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