Joseph Conrad
Published: 2018-05-29
Total Pages: 101
Get eBook
This Revised and Expanded Edition contains hundreds of new notes and illustrations.The first-ever fully annotated edition of one of the most beloved novels in the world is a sheer delight for Joseph cornad fans. Here is the complete text of heart of darkness with annotations and illustration on facing pages, including:Maps and illustrationsof places and objects mentioned in the novel.About the Author- Joseph Conrad did not begin to learn English until he was twenty-one years old. He was born Josef Theodor Conrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. When Conrad was quite young, his father was exiled to Siberia on suspicion of plotting against the Russian government. After the death of the boy's mother, Conrad's father sent him to his mother's brother in Krakow to be educated, and Conrad never again saw his father. He traveled to Marseilles when he was seventeen and spent the next twenty years as a sailor. He signed on to an English ship in 1878, and eight years later he became a British subject. In 1889, he began his first novel, AL Mayer's Folly, and began actively searching for a way to fulfill his boyhood dream of traveling to the Congo. He took command of a steamship in the Belgian Congo in 1890, and his experiences in the Congo came to provide the outline for Heart of Darkness.introduction- Heart of Darkness originally appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It was eventually published as a whole in 1902, as the third work in a volume Conrad titled Youth. Since its publication in Youth, the novel has fascinated numerous readers and critics, almost all of whom regarded the novel as an important one because of the ways it uses ambiguity and (in Conrad's own words), "fogginess" to dramatize Marlow's perceptions of the horrors he encounters. Critics have regarded Heart of Darkness as a work that in several important ways broke many narrative conventions and brought the English novel into the twentieth century.Although Polish by birth, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is regarded as one of the greatest writers in English, and Heart of Darkness, first published in 1902, is considered by many his "most famous, finest, and most enigmatic story." -- Encyclopaedia Britannica. The tale concerns the journey of the narrator (Marlow) up the Congo River on behalf of a Belgian trading company. Far upriver, he encounters the mysterious Kurtz, an ivory trader who exercises an almost godlike sway over the inhabitants of the region. Both repelled and fascinated by the man, Marlow is brought face to face with the corruption and despair that Conrad saw at the heart of human existence.In its combination of narrative and symbolic power, masterly character study and acute psychological penetration, Heart of Darkness ranks as a landmark of modern fiction. It is a book no serious student of literature can afford to miss.