Andrew Radford reviewed Joseph Conrad and The Reader in Year’s Work in English Studies on May 12, 2011:
‘Amar Acheraïou’s Joseph Conrad and the Reader: Questioning Modern Theories of Narrative and Readership adopts an innovative, theoretically informed approach to the fiction by construing Conrad’s “slippery, nomadic aura” (p. 19) through the lens of urgent debates about visual strategies, audience expectation, and the ethics of authorship. Acheraïou is at his most persuasive when gauging Conrad’s imaginative debt to nineteenth-century French novelists such as Flaubert, whose “theory of authorship” Conrad “elaborates” in surprising ways (p. 17). The discerning textual analysis of Under Western Eyes operates to show that for Conrad “the modern writer is not dead, nor exiled, nor epistemologically irrelevant”, as deconstructionist pundits propose. Rather, Acheraïou demonstrates that “the modern author haunts the interstices of his/her indeterminate, multilayered narratives” (p. 186). Such an authorial revenant underscores that “the writer in modern texts” rarely “ceases to be a potential epistemic and signifying site of power” (p. 186). Yet this power, as the closing chapters indicate, is “always chameleon-like, functioning stealthily, by means of veiling and subtle manipulation” (p. 185). That Conrad’s treatment of reader-response theory and narrative form exemplifies the presence of a “constant dialogue” (p. 185) with ancient as well as modern concepts is admirably borne out by some ingenious analysis of Lord Jim and A Personal Record.’