Heart of Darkness (Fifth Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, Aug 29, 2016 - Fiction - 504 pages

“This is the best Norton Critical Edition yet! All my students have become intensely interested in reading Conrad—largely because of this excellent work.” —Elise F. Knapp, Western Connecticut State University

This Norton Critical Edition includes:
- A newly edited text based on the first English book edition (1902), the last version to which Conrad is known to have actively contributed. “Textual History and Editing Principles” provides an overview of the textual controversies and ambiguities perpetually surrounding Heart of Darkness.
- Background and source materials on colonialism and the Congo, nineteenth-century attitudes toward race, Conrad in the Congo, and Conrad on art and literature.
- Fifteen illustrations.
- Seven contemporary responses to the novella along with eighteen essays in criticism—ten of them new to the Fifth Edition,
including an entirely new subsection on film adaptations of Heart of Darkness.
- A Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography.
 

Contents

Cover
HEART OF DARKNESS
TEXTUAL APPENDIX
IMPERIALISM AND THE CONGO
NINETEENTHCENTURY ATTITUDES TOWARD RACE
CONRAD IN THE CONGO
THE AUTHOR ON ART AND LITERATURE
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2016)

Joseph Conrad is recognized as one of the 20th century's greatest English language novelists. He was born Jozef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. His father, a writer and translator, was from Polish nobility, but political activity against Russian oppression led to his exile. Conrad was orphaned at a young age and subsequently raised by his uncle. At 17 he went to sea, an experience that shaped the bleak view of human nature which he expressed in his fiction. In such works as Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), and Nostromo (1904), Conrad depicts individuals thrust by circumstances beyond their control into moral and emotional dilemmas. His novel Heart of Darkness (1902), perhaps his best known and most influential work, narrates a literal journey to the center of the African jungle. This novel inspired the acclaimed motion picture Apocalypse Now. After the publication of his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), Conrad gave up the sea. He produced thirteen novels, two volumes of memoirs, and twenty-eight short stories. He died on August 3, 1924, in England. Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English and former Dean of the College at Brown University. He was previously a professor and a dean at the University of Oregon and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has also taught at the University of Copenhagen, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Virginia, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. He is the author of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art ; Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form ; Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation ; The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford ; and The Phenomenology of Henry James. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of E. M. Forster's Howards End and of the fourth and fifth Norton Critical Editions of Heart of Darkness.

Bibliographic information