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"Ain't we men?": illusions of gender in Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus".(Critical essay)

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From: Conradiana
Date: 20060922
Author:Packer-Kinlaw, Donna

Henry James hailed Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" as "the very finest & strongest picture of the sea and sea-life that our language possesses--the masterpiece in a whole class," and Stephen Crane remarked that Conrad "comes nearer to an ownership of the mysterious life on the ocean than anybody who has written in this century" (qtd in Simmons, "Introduction" xvii; Carabine 263). The story essentially seeks to depict the day-to-day reality of sea life, but how does Conrad avoid what Ian Watt has called "the ordinariness of ordinary life" (100)? For "it is difficult ...

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