Joseph Conrad and the Orient is the first major study that deeply explores Conrad"s perception and construction of the Orient in his Malay fiction. While it entertains a sustained dialogue with past and recent studies of Conrad"s handling of colonial cross-cultural encounters, imperial ideology and race politics, this collection of original essays extends the debates on these key issues. The authors adopt a variety of critical and methodological perspectives -- socio-political, anthropological, philosophical, postcolonial, poststructuralist, historical, and linguistic -- in order to illuminate the richness, complexity and multi-dimensional character of Conrad"s work. Overall, these compelling approaches enlighten Conrad"s deep engagement with the East, not only as a crucial source of fictional material, but also as a polyphonic discursive space, a cultural and racial Other, an ideological construct, and a site of Western struggle for global commercial hegemony and native anti-colonial resistance.