"The volume focuses on cross-cultural encounters, cultural identity and cultural dislocation in this fiction, paying particular attention to issues of 'race' and gender. It also situates Conrad's writings about Malaysia in relation to earlier English accounts of the archipelago. It considers work by Mundy, Keppel, Wallace and Clifford, which Conrad had read, as well as exploring the discursive formation within which that work was produced.

At the same time, it also indicates something of the region's history of cross-cultural encounters." "The book draws on new historicism, as well as postcolonial and postmodern theory, to explore the central problem that Conrad addressed in his fiction: how to represent another culture."--BOOK JACKET.