
The existential philosophy of participation-so mistrustful of analytical categories-is epitomized by the lives and oeuvres of Melville and Conrad.


Its twenty-one chapters, written by some of the world’s leading Melville and Conrad scholars, indicate possible directions of comparativist insight into the continuity and transformations of western existentialist thought between the 19th and 20th centuries. The present book explores a variety of fundamental questions that all of us secretly share.
