Conrad and Intellectual Movements

In The Historical Novel (1937), Georg Lukács wrote that Walter Scott 'had no knowledge of Hegel's philosophy and had he come across it would probably not have understood a word' (Lukács, p. 30). Conversely, Conrad's fiction incorporated a wealth of historical, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas resulting from the writer's overt dialogue with nineteenth-century European thought. The philosophy of Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, the Polish Romantics and Positivists, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson represents the intellectual backdrop to Conrad's explorations of individual and communal identity.