Heart of Darkness

A newly edited and richly annotated version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, now considered a classic of early modernism.

Joseph Conrad (Author), Owen Knowles (Edited by), Allan H. Simmons (Edited by)

9781108428897, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 September 2018

204 pages
22.2 x 14.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.36 kg

'I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold'. Charles Marlow's dark intuition here arrives at the culmination of his physical and psychological quest in search of the infamous ivory-trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's most famous short story, Heart of Darkness. Ambiguously drawn to the powerful 'voice' of this autocratic European who has become a self-proclaimed ruler in an African colony, Marlow is increasingly embroiled in Kurtz's life and death: he is finally forced into a radical questioning, not only of his own assumptions, but also of the civilized and imperial pretensions of Western Europe. Offering a freshly-researched text based on the writer's original documents, this edition presents a classic of early modernist fiction in a version that, for the first time, recovers Conrad's preferred wordings, punctuation and narrative structure.

List of maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A note on the text
Select bibliography
Chronology
Abbreviations and note on editions
Heart of Darkness
Appendices
Notes
Glossary of nautical terms.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature: history & criticism [DS]