This article seeks to challenge current understandings of Conrad's status as a maritime writer by considering his many treatments of the sea not as fictionalized versions of his personal experiences as a sailor but as a sustained attempt to reimagine the sea as a literary object. As the earliest reviews of Typhoon attest, contemporaries regarded Conrad's evocation of the sea as unparalleled in both its strangeness and its verisimilitude. This conundrum, I propose, derives from Conrad's desire to recover for literature a maritime space which, as he saw it, had become disenchanted (in Weber's sense) by its mediation in early twentieth-century culture. Indeed, Typhoon, it is argued, was inspired by and in key respects modelled upon Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), a novel that had been readily available to Conrad in its Polish serialization in Warsaw's Gazeta Polska in 1870–71.

本文旨在通过考虑康拉德对海的许多对待，而不是将其作为水手的个人经历的虚构化版本，而是作为对海作为文学对象的持续尝试，来挑战当前对康拉德作为海事作家的理解。作为对台风的最早评论，当代人认为康拉德对海洋的唤起在其陌生性和真实性上都是无与伦比的。我建议，这个难题源于康拉德渴望为文学恢复一个海洋空间的愿望，正如他所看到的那样，（由于韦伯的理解）海洋空间由于其在二十世纪早期文化中的介入而变得瓦解。确实，据称台风是受朱尔斯·凡尔纳（Jules Verne）的启发并在主要方面受到启发《海底两万个同盟》（1870年）是一部小说，康拉德1870-71年在华沙的加泽塔·波尔斯卡（Gazeta Polska）对其波兰语系列化时已经很容易获得它。