This book focuses on the complex relationships between inheritance, work, and desert in literature. It shows how, from its manifestation in the trope of material inheritance and legacy in Victorian fiction, inheritance gradually took on additional, more modern meanings in Joseph Conrads fiction on work and self-making. In effect, the emphasis on inheritance as referring to social rank and wealth acquired through birth shifted to a focus on talent, ability, and merit, often expressed through work.
The book explores how Conrads fiction engaged with these changing modes of inheritance and work, and the resulting claims of desert they led to. Uniquely, it argues that Conrads fiction critiques claims of desert arising from both work and inheritance, while also vividly portraying the emotional costs and existential angst that these beliefs in desert entailed.
The argument speaks to and illuminates todays debates on moral desert arising from work and inheritance, in particular from meritocratic ideals. Its new approach to Conrads works will appeal to students and scholars of Conrad and literary modernism, as well as a wider audience interested in philosophical and social debates on desert deriving from inheritance and work.
Evelyn Tsz Yan Chan is Associate Professor in English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her publications include Virginia Woolf and the Professions (2014), The Humanities in Contemporary Chinese Contexts (2016, Springer; as a contributor and co-editor), and The Value of the Humanities in Higher Education: Perspectives from Hong Kong (2020, Springer; as primary author). She has also published numerous articles on Joseph Conrad. Her primary research and teaching interests are in literary representations of work and education, and in philosophical issues arising from such representations.
