The third and less thematically unified phase of Conrad’s career includes the novels Chance (1913) and Victory (1915), as well as collections of short stories. Conrad is considered one of the finest stylists of English prose, a remarkable achievement for a man who did not learn the language until his twenties. In The Secret Agent he uses the literary technique of irony to explore some of the political tensions that gripped Europe near the turn of the twentieth century.
An era of tense diplomacy. The four decades between the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and the outbreak of World War I (1914) saw the last stage in the consolidation of Europe’s global empires. Of the six European states known as the Great Powers—Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary—each except for the last one ruled over a global empire that was often in direct competition with the others. While peace existed in Europe between 1871 and 1914, it was increasingly strained by a complex and often shifting network of treaties and alliances among the Great Powers. This tangled web of diplomacy forms the general background to The Secret Agent, in which Adolf Verloc, the secret agent of the title, ultimately takes his orders from a high-level diplomat in the Russian Embassy in London.
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