By placing Joseph Conrad's fiction at the center of an examination of the term "the West," this study reconceives the major contours of Conrad's work to show how the contemporary commonplace idea of the West emerged around the turn of the century from the combined and related phenomena of European imperial expansion and a crisis of democratic politics.

The author argues that twentieth-century ideas of the West can be traced to the convergence of two distinct discursive contexts: the "new imperialism" of the 1890's that gave wider currency to oppositions between East and West, and the influence of nineteenth-century Russian debates on Western European ideas of Europe.

The work of Conrad is shown to be uniquely suited to studying the relation between these two cultural and political contexts, since they provided Conrad with his two great themes - colonialism and revolution.