SOURCE: MacAdam, Alfred J. “Countries of the Mind: Literary Space in Joseph Conrad and José Donoso.” In Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature, pp. 61-87. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

In the following chapter from his book on comparative literature, MacAdam compares and contrasts Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and Donoso's A House in the Country, finding in each work a break with literary tradition.

[Jorge Luis] Borges begins his 1938 review of Absalom, Absalom! by comparing Faulkner to Joseph Conrad:

I know of two kinds of writer: one whose obsession is verbal procedure, and one whose obsession is the work and passions of men. The former tends to receive the derogatory label “Byzantine” and to be exalted as a “pure artist.” The other, more fortunate, has known such laudatory epithets as “profound,” “human,” “profoundly human,” and the flattering abuse of “primal.” … Among the great novelists, Joseph Conrad was...