The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

(Paperback)

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CUNDILL PRIZE 2018 WINNER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2018

Enlightening, compassionate, superb John le Carr

A visionary life and times of Joseph Conrad, and of our global world, from one of the best historians writing today.
Immigration, terrorism, the dangers of nationalism, the promise and peril of technological innovation: these forces shaped the life and work of Joseph Conrad at the dawn of the twentieth century. As Maya Jasanoff argues, Joseph Conrad described the beginnings of globalization as we recognize it today. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaysia to the Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad traced an interconnected world and described it in a literary oeuvre of prophetic power. His life and work offer a history of globalization from the inside out, and powerfully reflect the aspirations and the challenges of the modern world.

Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, to Polish parents in the Russian Empire. At sixteen he left the landlocked heart of Europe to become a sailor, and for the next twenty years travelled the worlds oceans before settling permanently in London as an author. He saw the surging, competitive new imperialism that planted a flag in almost every populated part of the globe. He got a close look, too, at the places beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, and the hypocrisy of the wests most cherished ideals.

Through an expert blend of history, biography, literary criticism, and travelogue, Maya Jasanoff traces the strands of Conrads experiences and the stories of his four greatest works: The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo. This spellbinding narrative casts new light on his age, and offers fresh insight into our own. Genre-bending, intellectually thrilling, and deeply humane, The Dawn Watch embarks on a bold expedition to the dark heart of Conrad and our global world.

Reviews

The Dawn Watch will win prizes, and if it doesn't there is something wrong with the prizes Guardian

A strikingly original book Jasanoff writes beautifully succeeds brilliantly an extraordinary and profoundly ambitious book, little short of a masterpiece William Dalrymple

Lucid, revelatory and wonderfully concise, The Dawn Watch celebrates Conrads uncanny prescience and shows his continued relevance now in the twenty-first century, Book of the Year, TLS, William Boyd

A startlingly original take of the state were in Book of the Year, TLS, Frances Wilson

'An enviably gifted writer her historian's eye can untie knots that might baffle the pure critic Jasanoff steers us securely and stylishly through those latitudes where Conrad witnessed the future scupper the past' Spectator

'So well written This is a biographer who has done her homework and her legwork for a book that creates a Conrad for our time. Enjoy it how rarely can one say that about a work of scholarship' The Times

Written with a novelist's flair for vivid detail and a scholar's attention to texts The Dawn Watch is by any standard a major contribution to our understanding of Conrad in his time what Jasanoff offers the reader is a fresh view of a much-scribbled-on-writer that enables us to see him in a time in many ways like our own Literary Review

Skillfully integrates details of Conrad's life and accounts of his four greatest works, linking the challenges and forces that lie behind and within the novels to those of the 21st century A powerful encouragement to read his books Economist

An unobtrusively skillful, subtle, clear-eyed book, beautifully narrated It is Jasanoff's warmth towards her subject that comes through Financial Times

Jasanoffs first-rate analysis of the global compass of Conrads fiction, in all its matchless beauty and grave intent Evening Standard

Maya Jasanoff's stands out for its vivid and imaginative writing Sunday Times

Author Bio

Maya Jasanoff is Coolidge Professor of history at Harvard University. Her first book, Edge of Empire, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous publications including the Economist, Guardian and Sunday Times. Her second, Liberty's Exiles was shortlisted for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize (now Baillie Gifford). A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Jasanoff won the prestigious 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Her essays and reviews appear frequently in publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.