John McClure charts the course of decline, first in the works of Joseph Conrad, chronicler of high imperialism's contradictions, then in the post-war fictions of Joan Didion, Robert Stone and Thomas Pynchon. He maps the complex field of romantic ideology where one can at once excoriate imperialist adventures and yet savor their taste.

John A. McClure is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction and Late Imperial Romance.