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A set of six

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A Set of Six (1908) is one of Conrad's most versatile and varied compositions, embracing diverse interests and settings, multiple tonal qualities and a medley of short-story forms (ranging from the novella in 'The Duel' to the anecdotal tale in 'The Informer'). The volume's wide-ranging introduction offers a careful evaluation of the origins and sources of the individual stories, while also measuring their early reception as a published collection. Explanatory notes clarify literary and historical references, identify real-life places and people, and indicate borrowings and Gallicisms. The lengthy textual essay and its accompanying apparatus lay out the history of composition and publication, detailing interventions made by Conrad's typists, compositors and editors. Also included are appendices, allowing the reader first-hand access to Conrad's source material; glossaries of nautical and foreign terms; and illustrations in the form of maps and reproductions of early drafts. By returning to (and respecting) Conrad's own early manuscript and typescript forms, this edition presents the collection and its preface in a form more authoritative than any so far printed.

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A set of six

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"Conrad wrote the stories that make up A Set of Six (1908) between late 1904, in the immediate wake of Nostromo (1904), and the spring of 1907, when he was attending to page proofs of The Secret Agent (1907). Yet another story - never finished if, indeed, ever begun - about 'a bomb in a hotel' also hovered in his mind at this time. As Conrad acknowledged in his brief preface to the volume's first American edition (1915), the stories, 'if not an organic whole', none the less constitute 'a homogeneous group written with a certain unity of method' (5.10-11), concentrated on incident and action (Letters, IV, 29-30) and were all based, he claimed, upon real-life events. Ranging widely in their geographical settings and time periods, the six tales further explore the preoccupations of his longer fictions - perhaps most broadly, the multifarious nature and manifestations of power and violence, major themes in Nostromo and central to The Secret Agent, both of which interrupted and dislodged from his desk the long-evolving Chance (1914)"--

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