Heart of Darkness (Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad) - Softcover

'I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold'. Charles Marlow's dark intuition here arrives at the culmination of his physical and psychological quest in search of the infamous ivory-trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's most famous short story, Heart of Darkness. Ambiguously drawn to the powerful 'voice' of this autocratic European who has become a self-proclaimed ruler in an African colony, Marlow is increasingly embroiled in Kurtz's life and death: he is finally forced into a radical questioning, not only of his own assumptions, but also of the civilized and imperial pretensions of Western Europe. Offering a freshly-researched text based on the writer's original documents, this edition presents a classic of early modernist fiction in a version that, for the first time, recovers Conrad's preferred wordings, punctuation and narrative structure.

Owen Knowles, Research Fellow at the University of Hull, is the author of A Conrad Chronology (2014), An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (1992) and the Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad (with Gene M. Moore, 2000). Advisory Editor to The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society, he has also edited a number of works for the Cambridge Edition of Conrad's Works, Everyman Library and Penguin Books, and has also edited Volumes 6 and 9 of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge, 2002, 2007) as well as two volumes of correspondence to and about Conrad.