The Textual Apparatus of Empire in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
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Pramod K. Nayar
Abstract
This essay argues that the collapse of Empire in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is troped as the erosion of textuality. Five key instances of this textual collapse occur in the novel: the maps Marlow reads as a child, the accounting books, the seaman’s manual, the Kurtz Report and the Company papers. There are also a few minor instances of similar textual collapses, which also come to attention here. The essay notes that in each case the text’s significance is lost or altered in specific ways, and this contributes to the erosion of the authority of the text.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Constructing the Poet’s ‘Now’: “Deor’s” Modernist Temporalities
- Beaumont and Fletcher Rewrite Cervantes: Love’s Pilgrimage, a Farcical Representation of Spain and a Subversion of Jacobean Patriarchy
- The Textual Apparatus of Empire in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
- Narrative Conflict and Implied Value Conflict: An Analysis of Aspects of the Implied Worldview of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002) and Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002)
- Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and the Element of Playfulness in Emily Dickinson
- Climate Change and the Ironies of Omniscience in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind
- Reviews
- John Gallagher. 2019. Learning Languages in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 286 pp., 19 illustr., £ 63.00.
- Review
- Michael D. J. Bintley. 2020. Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England: Texts, Landscapes, and Material Culture. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 45. Turnhout: Brepols, 231 pp., 13 illustr., € 75.00.
- Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki (eds.). 2019. Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xviii + 498 pp., 4 figures, 3 maps, £ 95.00 (hb)/£ 20.00 (pb).
- A. W. Strouse. 2021. Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision. New York: Fordham University Press, 165 pp., $ 90.00 (hc)/$ 25.00 (pb).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Constructing the Poet’s ‘Now’: “Deor’s” Modernist Temporalities
- Beaumont and Fletcher Rewrite Cervantes: Love’s Pilgrimage, a Farcical Representation of Spain and a Subversion of Jacobean Patriarchy
- The Textual Apparatus of Empire in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
- Narrative Conflict and Implied Value Conflict: An Analysis of Aspects of the Implied Worldview of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002) and Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002)
- Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and the Element of Playfulness in Emily Dickinson
- Climate Change and the Ironies of Omniscience in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind
- Reviews
- John Gallagher. 2019. Learning Languages in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 286 pp., 19 illustr., £ 63.00.
- Review
- Michael D. J. Bintley. 2020. Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England: Texts, Landscapes, and Material Culture. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 45. Turnhout: Brepols, 231 pp., 13 illustr., € 75.00.
- Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki (eds.). 2019. Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xviii + 498 pp., 4 figures, 3 maps, £ 95.00 (hb)/£ 20.00 (pb).
- A. W. Strouse. 2021. Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision. New York: Fordham University Press, 165 pp., $ 90.00 (hc)/$ 25.00 (pb).
- Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl (eds.). 2019. Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences. Routledge Environmental Humanities. Abingdon: Routledge, xiv + 268 pp., 19 figures, 3 tables, £ 120.00.
- Ina Habermann (ed.). 2020. The Road to Brexit: A Cultural Perspective on British Attitudes to Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, xvi + 256 pp., 7 figures, 1 table, £ 80.00.
- Corinna Lenhardt. 2020. Savage Horrors: The Intrinsic Raciality of the American Gothic. American Culture Studies 29. Bielefeld: transcript, 288 pp., 1 figure, € 45.00.
- Timo Müller. 2018. The African American Sonnet: A Literary History. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, x + 172 pp., $ 99.00
- Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius (eds.). 2019. Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century. Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature. New York/Abingdon: Routledge, xiii + 209 pp., £ 120.00.
