Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary by Joseph Conrad Read Free Book Online Page B

‘Heart of Darkness’ (New York: Chelsea House, 1987).
    Firchow, Peter Edgerly, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).
    Fothergill, Anthony, ‘Heart of Darkness’ , Open Guides to Literature (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989).
    Moore, Gene M., ed., Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
    Murfin, Ross C., ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism (Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1989; 2nd edn 1996).
    Tredell, Nicolas, ed., Joseph Conrad: ‘Heart of Darkness’ , Icon Critical Guides (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998).
    Watts, Cedric, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Critical and Contextual Discussion (Milan: Mursia International, 1977).

A Note on the Texts
    The copy-text for Heart of Darkness is that of the first English edition of 13 November 1902; that for ‘The Congo Diary’ is the manuscript held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; and that for the ‘Author’s Note’ is the text first published in the second English edition of the Youth volume in September 1917 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons).
    Conrad composed Heart of Darkness during the period from mid-December 1898 to early February 1899 for the thousandth issue of Blackwood’s Magazine . A nearly complete manuscript is held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and a portion of revised typescript in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
    Under the title ‘The Heart of Darkness’, the story was serialized in Britain during February–April 1899, and appeared in the United States in The Living Age , June–August 1900. Along with two other stories, ‘Youth’ and ‘The End of the Tether’, it was first collected in Britain in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1902) and in the United States by McClure, Phillips of New York (1903). In both editions the story was renamed ‘Heart of Darkness’.
    Although this is not a critical edition, emendations to the Heart of Darkness copy-text have been made to correct outright errors, repair typographical flaws and rationalize minor inconsistencies. The first English edition has been compared with earlier stages of the text, including the manuscript (MS) and typescript fragment (TS), in order to take into account the complex circumstances of its early drafting, typing and printing, and thus to rectify a number of transmissional errors, mainly originating in the typescript prepared by Conrad’s wife, Jessie, and passing into all printed forms.
    Some features of Blackwood’s house-style have been silently modified. An occasional feature of Blackwood’s house-style, a comma and em-dash in combination (,—), has been replaced by an em-dash only. In the case of some spellings, Conrad’s habitual usage has been preferred to that in the first English edition: thus ‘further’, ‘by the bye’, ‘by and bye’ and ‘entrusted’ are preferred to ‘farther’, ‘by-the-by’, ‘by-and-by’ and ‘in-trusted’. Ambiguous hyphenation has been resolved on the basis of majority practice in the text, and, where no clear precedent exists, is determined by the spelling of the period.
    Written during his visit to the Congo in 1890, Conrad’s ‘Diary’ did not appear in print until after his death, when Richard Curle published an edited and annotated version in Blue Peter 5 (October 1925), pp. 319–25. This was later republished in his edition of Conrad’s Last Essays (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926).
    The manuscript bears the typical signs of an informal private diary not intended for publication, notably in its irregular or missing punctuation, abbreviated words and occasional