This book addresses debt in postcolonial fiction: financial, social, historical, and cultural. The author examines how literary characters including servants, fallen women, and cultural outsiders pay or refuse to pay the debts imposed upon them, and the consequences of debts paid and unpaid. Working at the intersection of critical race theory, queer theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, the book includes an overturning of the well-established argument about Conrad and race, an examination of the connection between debt and class both historical and contemporary, and direct comparisons between debt in fiction and current issues of debt in the economy world-wide.

Izabela Morska is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She is a former ISEEES Visiting Scholar and BBRG Affiliated Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, and a Yaddo, Hawthornden, and Iowa International Writers’ Workshop Fellow. She teaches at the English Department of Gdańsk University, Poland.