The Inwardness of Things considers Joseph Conrad as a modern voice in an ancient and enduring quarrel between the poets and the philosophers. Beginning from the polemical poetics of his 1897 preface, Debra Romanick Baldwin focuses on Conrad’s distinctively poetic “inward” approach to truth – an inwardness that is found in lived experience, in language, and in the world beyond the individual.

The book traces Conrad’s poetic voice from the rhetoric of his private letters to the narrative techniques of his fiction and finally to his explicit engagement with abstract approaches to truth. Baldwin applies narrative and rhetorical analysis to Conrad’s private correspondence, showing how he encouraged fellow writers – John Galsworthy, F. Warrington Dawson, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, Ted Sanderson, and Edward Noble – to engage with the inwardness of their own experience. The book explores how Conrad crafted moments of narrative solidarity in his fictional narratives to evoke the experience of the inwardness of another, while also considering his explicit polemics against abstract approaches to truth-seeking.

Mindful of the colonial, late Victorian, Polish Romantic, and cosmopolitan contexts in which Conrad wrote, The Inwardness of Things nevertheless situates him in a broader human conversation that he himself invited and argues for the enduring value of his art.