"Homo Duplex": Joseph Conrad e i linguaggi del nazionalismo

Focusing on Conrad's unconventional appropriation of nationalist tropes common in late nineteenth-century Britain, this essay takes his experience of exile as the enabling condition for his ethical and aesthetic approach to national identity and belonging. Focusing on the double tension that informs Conrad's early works, in particular Youth, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, the essay argues that Conrad's oeuvre performs a reassuring Englishness while implicitly questioning nationalist and imperialist values. This process takes place through a wide range of rhetorical devices: cla-rifications, contradictions, implications, symbols that convey contradictory meanings, dialectical reversals. Although he stops short of articulating an explicit critique of nationalism and imperialism, the essay argues, Conrad challenges them in many ways, articulating two levels of meaning and demanding an intensive, active interpretation that scans the text for implied meanings.