The three speakers (all members of multiple Conrad societies) have often presented their work at European and UK academic gatherings, but their work has never before been brought together in a North American context. The American Conrad Society hopes to rectify this lack.

The first speaker, Joanna Skolik, concentrates on the encoding of Polish heritage in Conrad's major texts, with focus on the invisible cultural filters by which we are to recognise the rooting of his female characters in Polish literary tradition. A focal point will be what that author called the 'incomprehensible, inconceivable, elusive aspects" of his own Polishness. As filtered through relevant female characters, Skolik hopes to make visible, across national and literary lines, the extent to which Conrad's inner conflicts around heritage spilled over into his fictions. Surveying characters from "Amy Foster" to Nostromo, Skolik shows how Conrad managed to shift his Polish cultural background onto a universal level, so better to trace the ways in which national heritage is encoded in his texts. Importantly, she discovers that elusiveness, not least in a female setting, is the principle that allows Conrad to confront both his guilt over, and ironic treatment of his national heritage.

The second speaker, Sylwia Janina Wojciechowska, contextualises Conrad's strongly divided national loyalties with regard to his autobiographical legacy as a Pole who wishes to divert direct public attention from his contested allegiances. Focused upon images of nation around the concepts of patria and patris, she argues that rather like his deracinated female characters, Conrad constantly deflected awareness away from both the broader and narrower elements of his relations to home and the possibilities of homecoming. In essence, Professor Wojciechowska aligns Conrad's own loyalties as torn - as is true for so many of his characters - between global belonging and a home culture. Moreover, what Conrad's life writings reveal, and as is true for nearly all of the key female protagonists in his fiction, is the impossibility of a quasi-Odyssean nostos - and thus, for Conrad as for the women in his fictions, a true homecoming was never directly foreseeable.

Lastly, Anna Szczepan Wojnarska, combines themes of the first papers in order to exemplify, as Susan Jones has intimated, the ways in which Conrad’s female protagonists not only rise from distinctively Polish tradition, but constitute an important expression of that author's critique of literary and nationalistic romanticisms. Employing “Grażyna” (1822) by Adam Mickiewicz as a poetic and fictional intertext by which to read the character of Lena in Conrad's Victory, she aligns both novels around female self-sacrifice in a new home, not only dramatising Conrad's putative abdication of his familial and national heritages, but underlining how Lena allows the author to evoke Polish romanticism in the turmoil of that character's new allegiances. Notwithstanding how Conrad himself had allowed that his work hoped to 'do justice to the visible world,' Wojnarska reveals a nuanced Polish-inflected reading of the author's efforts to make visible his own struggles with Polishness and the gender positions by which that contest might be fictionally performed.