| Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Editions) |  | Author: Joseph Conrad
Creator: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
Buy New: $10.70
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Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,233
Media: Paperback
Edition: 4th
Pages: 544
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0393926362
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780393926361
ASIN: 0393926362
Publication Date: December 13, 2005
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Product Description
Product Description
The Fourth Edition is again based on Robert Kimbrough's meticulously re-edited text. Missing words have been restored and the entire novel has been repunctuated in accordance with Conrad's style. The result is the first published version of Heart of Darkness that allows readers to hear Marlow's voice as Conrad heard it when he wrote the story. "Backgrounds and Contexts" provides readers with a generous collection of maps and photographs that bring the Belgian Congo to life. Textual materials, topically arranged, address nineteenth-century views of imperialism and racism and include autobiographical writings by Conrad on his life in the Congo. New to the Fourth Edition is an excerpt from Adam Hochschild's recent book, King Leopold's Ghost, as well as writings on race by Hegel, Darwin, and Galton. "Criticism" includes a wealth of new materials, including nine contemporary reviews and assessments of Conrad and Heart of Darkness and twelve recent essays by Chinua Achebe, Peter Brooks, Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan, Edward Said, and Paul B. Armstrong, among others. Also new to this edition is a section of writings on the connections between Heart of Darkness and the film Apocalypse Now by Louis K. Greiff, Margot Norris, and Lynda J. Dryden. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
About the Author
Paul B. Armstrong is Dean of the College and Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form, Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation, The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford and The Phenomenology of Henry James. He is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of E.M. Forster's Howards End.
Product Details
* Paperback: 544 pages
* Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 4th edition (December 13, 2005)
* ISBN-10: 0393926362
* Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
 Best edition of great novel November 15, 2006
S. H. Wells (Tulsa, OK United States)
32 out of 34 found this review helpful
Heart of Darkness is one of those classics of literature that should be read by everyone. It is dark and deeply psychological. But more than just a great novel, it is probably one of the most frequently referenced culture touchstones in the western world (if you think Apocolypse Now was an "important film," then you should read the inspiration behind it--Heart of Darkness). But anyone can find "what is this book about" on many websites. THe Norton Critical edition is probably the best way to read Heart of Darkness. THe Norton Critical edition includes contemporary reviews, and major literary critics discussing the importance of the book. In other words, if you read the Norton Critical edition you'll of course be able to talk about "what happens" in the book but also "why it is significant"
The Devil Froze From Fear August 8, 2007
T. Dodge (Pennsylvania)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Daytime scents of nightmare horrors. Man and his insane ways - bushman, postman, commoner, who to blame? Unless you are familiar with the background of this stunning novel do yourself a favor and get the Norton Critical Edition. For a century Conrad's novel has drawn raves and rage. Each is left to decide where the sanity line lies, to the right or to the left. Upriver or downriver? Riveting every page of the way.
After all these years, ... February 8, 2008
Anonymous (USA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
... I reread Heart of Darkness because my "guys" reading group included two who had not ever read it. The story stands up far, far better than I would have guessed. Conrad is really superb, and this shortish novel could well persuade new readers that "literary" stuff is worth their while. I had forgotten how subtle, how grown-up Conrad's expectations of his reader are. Truly quite marvelous.
With trepidation, I splurged on the Norton edition, even though I am pretty hostile to English-Professor post-modern posturing and nonsense. I am glad I got it, however. The wealth of historical documents help make the then-contemporary setting come real. The big surprise for me was Chinua Achebe's fine essay. While "bloody racist" is still over the top, Achebe has a case of some importance, and argues it well. It is even a comfort to find that the knee-jerk responses by assorted literature professors are indeed just as much postie poo as I had expected. (It's always a pleasure to find that one's unexamined prejudices are warranted after all.)
A particular pleasure for me was talking about the book with my daughter, who has taught it to her honors high school English class. She has developed views, and I learned really quite a lot from listening to her. Book, $11.90; my time, $free; finding out your daughter has deep insight and can teach you, PRICELESS.
In short, wonderful story and useful edition.
Brilliance August 24, 2006
Matthew Menjou (Los Angeles, CA)
20 out of 24 found this review helpful
Recently criticized by PC "academics" for its racism, Heart of Darkness remains one of the best books ever written. Yes, the book is racist, but it is no different than most of the prejudices held by Western Europeans of the period. That doesn't detract from the fact that this book is beautifully written (Conrad's long, twisting sentences, like the River Marlow travels up, have inspired my writing style to a great degree) and works as an amazing allegory for the dual nature of humanity: the battle between man and the inner beast. Before you let anybody turn you off of this book for its racism or its long sentence structure, just give it a read-through (its very short, though there's a lot underneath the surface). This is one trip upriver you won't regret.
"Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works October 20, 2007
Michael A Neulander (VA)
16 out of 19 found this review helpful
I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Buy this edition, it is the best with great critical essays. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.
Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.
Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).
I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!
As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
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