Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Casebook

ISBN-13: 9780195159967 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 288 str.

Gene M. Moore

Opis

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.

Recenzje

Moore has assembled something new and valuable, deliberately avoiding some of the usually anthologized material while pushing the boundaries of critical commentary.... Not only are all of the selected works provocative and substantive in their own way, each inviting us to reconsider the text's contexts and our own assumptions, so too the collection as a whole - by juxtaposing historical tidbit and serious study, theoretical meditation and comic relief - brims with a life which will gratify the hungry curiosity of the general reader and prompt the more reticent student to exclaim, 'Cool!?