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Conrad, "The Times", And Some Explorers, Aaron Eastley

Faculty Publications

Even in a day when historicism in literary studies is ubiquitous, the pitch and duration of historicist fervor that has surrounded Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is extraordinary. Since its original publication over a century ago, the text has flourished amid a swarm of meta-textual narratives variously critical, political, philosophical, and historical. As Benita Parry attests, Heart of Darkness has enjoyed a “singular afterlife” (41), one that Allan Simmons aptly captures in the metaphor of “a pendulum swinging back and forth between aesthetics and history” (104). First appearing serially as “The Heart of Darkness” in three monthly installments of Blackwood’s Edinburgh …