Description
The three short stories in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" are "Youth," "The End of the Tether," and "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus.'" "Youth" is set in the Congo in the 1890s and tells the story of a young white man, Marlow, who travels there to explore the Congo's interior. Marlow is disgusted by the brutality and corruption he sees in the Congo, and he comes to believe that the Congo is a place where humans are nothing more than animals. "The End of the Tether" is a story about a sailor, Kurtz, who goes insane after he is stranded on a island in the Congo. "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" is a story about a black man, Kurtz's servant, who is captured by the Europeans in the Congo and is forced to work on a ship.
'Youth', Heart of Darkness and 'The End of the Tether' make up Conrad's most celebrated collection of short narratives. Heart of Darkness forms its sombre centrepiece: set in the Congo of the 1890s, this haunting and widely influential Modernist masterpiece explores the limits of human experience as well as the nightmarish realities and consequences of imperialism. The Cambridge edition presents this trio of stories and Conrad's preface to the collection in forms more authoritative than any so far published. The introduction situates the stories in Conrad's publishing career, traces their sources and surveys contemporary reception. The edition includes detailed explanatory and contextual notes, a glossary of nautical terms, maps and illustrations. A textual essay and comprehensive apparatus reveal the history of each story's composition, revision and publication. This volume will allow scholars to see these familiar stories in a fresh light, by returning to Conrad's original texts. Review: 'Restoring 'Heart of Darkness' to the more traditional context of Conrad's works as a whole ... the Cambridge Edition becomes controversial since it now offers us a version of 'Heart of Darkness' that readers have never before encountered.' John Lyon, University of Bristol Review of the series: 'The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad aims to be definitive, and [the books] have both scholarly and physical weight ... The explanatory notes are compendious and thoughtfully arranged ... invaluable to scholars of Conrad, modernist literary composition and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary practices and processes ... These elegant and comprehensive volumes are a must for university libraries ... [the series] is without question a definitive piece of scholarship.' Andrew Frayn, Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship
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