Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Casebook (Casebooks in Criticism)

Heart of Darkness , Joseph Conrad's fictional account of a journey up the Congo river in 1890, raises important questions about colonialism and narrative theory. This casebook contains materials relevant to a deeper understanding of the origins and reception of this controversial text, including Conrad's own story "An Outpost of Progress," together with a little-known memoir by one of Conrad's oldest English friends, a brief history of the Congo Free State by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a parody of Conrad by Max Beerbohm. A wide range of theoretical approaches are also represented, examining Conrad's text in terms of cultural, historical, textual, stylistic, narratological, post-colonial, feminist, and reader-response criticism. The volume concludes with an interview in which Conrad compares his adventures on the Congo with Mark Twain's experiences as a Mississippi pilot. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's fictional account of a journey up the Congo river in 1890, raises important questions about colonialism and narrative theory. This casebook contains materials relevant to a deeper understanding of the origins and reception of this controversial text, including Conrad's own story "An Outpost of Progress," together with a little-known memoir by one of Conrad's oldest English friends, a brief history of the Congo Free State by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a parody of Conrad by Max Beerbohm. A wide range of theoretical approaches are also represented, examining Conrad's text in terms of cultural, historical, textual, stylistic, narratological, post-colonial, feminist, and reader-response criticism. The volume concludes with an interview in which Conrad compares his adventures on the Congo with Mark Twain's experiences as a Mississippi pilot. Contents......Page 8 Introduction......Page 12 An Outpost of Progress......Page 26 Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent......Page 52 From The Crime of the Congo......Page 98 Joseph Conrad’s First Cruise in the Nellie......Page 120 To the End of the Night......Page 134 The Typescript of “The Heart of Darkness”......Page 162 The Feast, by J*s*ph C*nr*d......Page 174 Conrad’s Impressionism......Page 178 Narratological Parallels in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now......Page 192 The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness......Page 206 Heart of Darkness Revisited: The African Response......Page 228 Jungle Fever......Page 252 A Chat with Joseph Conrad......Page 276 Suggested Reading......Page 286 A novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad in which the sailor Charles Marlow tells his listeners the story of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. The novel is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not name the river on which most of the narrative takes place, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and economically important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition This casebook assembles historical and theoretical materials relevant to a deeper understanding of the origins and reception of Joseph Conrad's best-knowen and most controversial work, with texts by Conrad himself, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Max Beerbohm, and distinguished scholars such as Zdzislaw Najder and Ian Watt. Presents a range of the most important essays published on Conrad's most famous novel