Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [143]
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. The chapter on Heart of Darkness intelligently contextualizes Conrad’s novella in the history of imperialism.
Fleishman, Avrom. Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Analyzes Conrad’s political ideas and their expression in his fiction.
GoGwilt, Christopher. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Heavily informed by critical and postcolonial theory, this is a fine study although a difficult go for the general reader.
Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. An important study of Conrad’s fiction; the orientation is primarily psychoanalytic.
Hay, Eloise Knapp. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963; revised ed., 1981. An astute assessment of the political aspects of Conrad’s fiction.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. A highly readable account of King Leopold II’s Congo and a fine rendering of the historical background of Heart of Darkness.
Kimbrough, Robert, ed. Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism. Third edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Contains a wide assortment of background materials and critical works on the novella.
Knowles, Owen, and Gene M. Moore. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. A very useful encyclopedia.
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948. An influential work of criticism that helped to solidify Conrad’s place in the history of British literature.
Moser, Thomas C. Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. An account of the arc of Conrad’s career as a whole.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Of Said’s several books that discuss Conrad and imperialism, this one deals most extensively with Heart of Darkness.
Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Eastern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. This and the next title are painstakingly documented accounts of the sources of Conrad’s fiction.
—. Conrad’s Westem World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
—, ed. Conrad: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Contains a generous selection of contemporary reviews of Conrad’s fiction.
Stape, J. H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. A useful collection of essays on various aspects of Conrad’s career and writings.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. The single most important study of Conrad’s early fiction, including Heart of Darkness. Although it was planned as the first of two volumes on Conrad, Watt never completed the second volume. His posthumously published Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), however, contains some material that would have been included in it.
Watts, Cedric. A Preface to Conrad. Second edition. London and New York: Longman, 1993. A smart introduction to Conrad for the general reader.
Letters
Karl, Frederick R., Laurence Davies, and Owen Knowles, eds. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983-. Of the projected eight volumes, six have been published to date: vol. 1,1983; vol. 2,1986; vol. 3,1988; vol. 4, 1990; vol. 5, 1996; vol. 6, 2002.
Memoirs and Reminiscences
Conrad, Jessie. Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him. London: Heinemann, 1926. This and the following title are two fanciful and sometimes