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Joseph Conrad achieved worldwide literary renown in his third language. Despite not having learned English until his twenties, Conrad succeeded in breaking new ground with his portrayal of anti-heroes & distinctive narrative style, becoming a major influence on 20th century English language fiction.
Joseph Conrad (born Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924) was a Polish-born novelist. Some of his works have been labelled romantic: Conrad's supposed "romanticism" is heavily imbued with irony and a fine sense of man's capacity for self-deception. Many critics regard Conrad as an important forerunner of Modernist literature. Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller and Jerzy Kosiński, as well as inspiring such films as Apocalypse Now (which was drawn from Conrad's Heart of Darkness).
Fiction has power to portray historical truth. This book presents Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to students and general readers as an insightful guide to the history of Europe and Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The phrase "heart of darkness" has become a term commonly used to conjure an ominous sense of hidden or deeply rooted evil. How did these words become so evocative? The answer lies in the richness and acute insight of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's story based on his 1890 journey on the Congo River. Conrad's novella illustrates many crucial themes of European and world history through the last two centuries: civilization; exploration; colonialism and imperialism; race and conflict based on race; trade and globalization; commercial exploitation; and the impact of changing technology, especially for communication and transport. Heart of Darkness deserves to be studied today for its value as social and cultural history. In this edition, Conrad's story is shown to reveal important truths not only about Europe and Africa a century ago, but also about the historical forces that shape the world we live in now. Featuring the texts of both Heart of Darkness and Conrad's autobiographical Congo Diary along with more than 200 annotations, this book enables readers to appreciate the connections between Conrad's writing and its historical context. Introductory essays explain how Conrad was uniquely positioned to chronicle history, provide critical background information on how Europeans partitioned Africa and created the Congo Free State, and describe how the ivory and rubber trades brutalized the natives. Readers will learn how Conrad contributed to European awareness of the atrocities committed and understand how the story's literary qualities form an essential part of its historical meaning. The numerous illustrations and maps depicting the historical Congo Free State provide a visual element to the story of Heart of Darkness—a fictionalized tale that can be interpreted as history and that can help us interpret today's postcolonial, globalized world.
Heart Of Darkness. The story of the civilized, enlightened Mr. Kurtz who embarks on a harrowing "night journey" into the savage heart of Africa, only to find his dark and evil soul. The Secret Sharer. The saga of a young, inexperienced skipper forced to decide the fate of a fugitive sailor who killed a man in self-defense. As he faces his first moral test the skipper discovers a terrifying truth -- and comes face to face with the secret itself. Heart Of Darkness and The Secret Sharer draw on actual events and people that Conrad met or heard about during his many far-flung travels. In portraying men whose incredible journeys on land and at sea are also symbolic voyages into their own mysterious depths, these two masterful works give credence to Conrad's acclaim as a major psychological writer.
Heart of Darkness may be short, but that doesn't make it an easy read; the short novel is loaded with themes, imagery, and symbols. If you need a little help understanding it, let BookCaps help with this study guide. Along with chapter by chapter summaries and anaylisis, this book features the full text of Conrad's classic novel is also included. BookCap Study Guides are not meant to be purchased as alternatives to reading the book.
Edward W. Said locates Joseph Conrad's fear of personal disintegration in his constant re-narration of the past. Using the author's personal letters as a guide to understanding his fiction, Said draws an important parallel between Conrad's view of his own life and the manner and form of his stories. The critic also argues that the author, who set his fiction in exotic locations like East Asia and Africa, projects political dimensions in his work that mirror a colonialist preoccupation with "civilizing" native peoples. Said then suggests that this dimension should be considered when reading all of Western literature. First published in 1966, Said's critique of the Western self's struggle with modernity signaled the beginnings of his groundbreaking work, Orientalism, and remains a cornerstone of postcolonial studies today.
Rethinking Joseph Conrad's Concepts of Community uses Conrad's phrase 'strange fraternity' from The Rover as a starting point for an exploration of the concept of community in his writing, including his neglected vignettes and later stories. Drawing on the work of continental thinkers including Jacques Derrida, Jean Luc-Nancy and Hannah Arendt, Yamamoto offers original readings of Heart of Darkness, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', The Rover and Suspense and the short stories “The Secret Sharer”, “The Warrior's Soul” and “The Duel”. Working at the intersection between literature and philosophy, this is a unique and interdisciplinary engagement with Conrad's work.
Fiction has power to portray historical truth. This book presents Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to students and general readers as an insightful guide to the history of Europe and Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The phrase "heart of darkness" has become a term commonly used to conjure an ominous sense of hidden or deeply rooted evil. How did these words become so evocative? The answer lies in the richness and acute insight of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's story based on his 1890 journey on the Congo River. Conrad's novella illustrates many crucial themes of European and world history through the last two centuries: civilization; exploration; colonialism and imperialism; race and conflict based on race; trade and globalization; commercial exploitation; and the impact of changing technology, especially for communication and transport. Heart of Darkness deserves to be studied today for its value as social and cultural history. In this edition, Conrad's story is shown to reveal important truths not only about Europe and Africa a century ago, but also about the historical forces that shape the world we live in now. Featuring the texts of both Heart of Darkness and Conrad's autobiographical Congo Diary along with more than 200 annotations, this book enables readers to appreciate the connections between Conrad's writing and its historical context. Introductory essays explain how Conrad was uniquely positioned to chronicle history, provide critical background information on how Europeans partitioned Africa and created the Congo Free State, and describe how the ivory and rubber trades brutalized the natives. Readers will learn how Conrad contributed to European awareness of the atrocities committed and understand how the story's literary qualities form an essential part of its historical meaning. The numerous illustrations and maps depicting the historical Congo Free State provide a visual element to the story of Heart of Darkness—a fictionalized tale that can be interpreted as history and that can help us interpret today's postcolonial, globalized world.
Through attention to incidents of betrayal and self-betrayal in his fiction, this book traces the development of Conrad's conception of identity through the three phases of his career: the self in isolation, the self in society and the sexualised self. It shows how the early fiction negotiates the opposed dangers of the self-ideal and the surrender to passion; how the middle fiction tests the ideal code psychologically and ideologically; and how the late fiction probes sexuality and morbid psychology.
The book builds on current interventions in modernist scholarship in order to rethink Joseph Conrad's contribution to literary history. It utilizes emerging critical modernisms, the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and late modernist fiction, to stage an encounter between Conrad and a radically different literary tradition. It does so in order to uncover critical blind spots that have limited our appreciation of his poetics. The purpose of this investigation is threefold: first, to participate in recent critical attempts to correct a neglect of ontological preoccupations in Conrad's writing and uncover the author's exploration of a human subject beyond the Cartesian cogito. Second, to demonstrate the manner in which such an exploration is accompanied by the reconfiguration of the very building blocks of fiction: character, narration, focalization, language and plot have to be rethought to accommodate a subject who is no longer conceived of as autonomous and whole but is rendered permeable and interdependent. Third, to show how this redrawing of the literary imaginary communicates with the projects of late modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett, writers whose literary endeavours have long been held separate from Conrad's. In the spirit of current re-examinations of modernism and critical endeavours to think it anew outside the commonplaces that once defined it, this study returns to Conrad's art with an eye to twentieth-century shifts in the way we process, understand and evaluate information. Thematic, stylistic and philosophical instantiations of the slow are offered here as a gauge for this meaningful transformation.