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Writing in his The Great Tradition, the respected critic F. R. Leavis noted that Joseph Conrad "is among the greatest novelists in the language--in any language." Indeed, language is at the very heart of Conrad country. That he is widely regarded as one of the foremost prose stylists of English literature is no small achievement for a man who did not learn the language until he was twenty. English was, in fact, his fourth language, after Polish, German, and French. An outsider himself--born Polish and naturalized as a British citizen--Conrad explores the penumbral world of the alienated, the disillusioned, the isolated, and morally devastated. He was, according to Kingsley Widmer in Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography (CDBLB), "a major figure in the transition from Victorian fiction to the more perplexed forms and values of twentieth-century literature. . . . Though writing in a time and culture often characterized as optimistic and affirmative, Conrad displays senses of defeat shading into a cosmic malignancy and an anxiously heavy ideological conservatism." In novels, novellas, and short stories such as The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Lord Jim, Typhoon, "Youth," "Heart of Darkness," and "The Secret Sharer," he explores the clash of cultures between modern and primitive, minutely describes the seagoing life as few other writers have been able to, and engages the reader in romanticized, symbolic adventure yarns.
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