Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
Claude Maisonnat

Lord Jim represents a watershed in Conrad's output to the extent that it is a transition from the early Malayan phase of Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the islands, with their exotic setting in which an isolated individual tries to survive in a hostile environment, to the more political novels of Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, in which the position of the individual in society and its ethical implications are closely examined. In the present study the emphasis is laid on the centrality of the tragic as a mode of structuration of the text, and on the spectral modalities of writing which give the book its unmistakable modernist ring.