In this chapter, I will discuss the critical reception of Conrad's works both at the time he was writing and afterwards. My goal is to present a history of the criticism and in the process discuss important studies of Conrad's works and identify crucial debates surrounding them. I will look at some of the early commentaries on Conrad's works, as well as Conrad's movement from canonical status to a state of disfavor to his reinstatement as a canonical writer. I will then follow his critical reception until the present.

During Conrad's lifetime, the reviews of his fiction were generally quite favorable. In fact, for some of his works the critical reception was even more favorable then than it is now. Given the number of commentaries on Conrad's work, it would be impossible to address them all. Even the book-length studies are too numerous to consider all of them, and so I have been forced to leave out many good commentaries. In outlining the history of Conrad criticism, I will consider those studies with which any student of Conrad's works should be familiar, along with those that have been important to the development of Conrad criticism, because of the work's high quality, because it marked an important moment in Conrad criticism, or because it initiated or continued a significant branch of Conrad criticism. In the process of this survey, I will focus largely on book-length studies since they have usually been the most important to the development of Conrad criticism.