Heart of Darkness (Annotated)

Joseph Conrad's Masterpiece of Empire and the Congo — A Critical Edition of Conrad's Most Debated Novel, with Essay and Biography

De: Joseph Conrad

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This annotated edition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness includes:
• An original critical afterword, "The Horror"
• The historical Congo behind the novel: Leopold II's atrocity
• The long debate over the book, from Chinua Achebe onward
• A biographical essay on Joseph Conrad and a note on the text

A volume in CLASSICS OF WORLD LITERATURE from Erato Press.

A steamer pushes up an African river toward a man named Kurtz — a European sent to bring civilization, who has instead made himself a god to be worshipped and a horror to be hidden. Marlow, who tells the tale, comes back carrying Kurtz's last words and no way to explain them: "The horror! The horror!" A verdict on what, exactly — on Kurtz, on empire, on Africa, on the human heart itself? Conrad never says. The refusal is the point.

Heart of Darkness is the most argued-over short novel in the English language. For some it is the great indictment of imperialism — the book that forced the real atrocity of the Congo, where Leopold II's regime worked millions to death, into European literature. For others, following Chinua Achebe's famous attack, it is itself an imperial artifact, one that turns an entire continent into a stage-set for a white man's crisis. The unsettling truth is that the novel sustains both readings at once, and has never stopped dividing its readers — which is exactly why the modern world can neither put it down nor settle it.

This is the paradox the edition takes seriously: a book about the impossibility of judging horror has itself become impossible to judge. To read it now is not to admire a monument, but to enter an argument.

This Erato Press edition presents the complete novella with an original critical afterword by Henry Bugalho — on the historical Congo behind the fiction, the meaning and the unmeaning of Kurtz's cry, and the long quarrel over the book from Achebe to the present — together with a biography of Conrad and a note on the text: the apparatus a reader needs not to be told what to think, but to be equipped to think.

The complete, unabridged text — Joseph Conrad's, not a summary and not an abridgement: for readers of Conrad, of modern classics, and of the literature of empire and its reckoning.