Heart of Darkness (Third Edition)

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The first incarnation of this Broadview edition of Heart of Darknessappeared in 1995, the second in 1999; both were widely acclaimed, and the Goonetilleke Heart of Darknessremained for many years one of Broadview's best-selling titles. For the third edition the book has been completely revised and updated to take account of the scholarship of the most recent generation. The introduction has been extensively rewritten, and the appendices of contextual materials thoroughly overhauled.

The two previous editions of the Goonetilleke Heart of Darknessincluded a substantial selection of documents on the history of Benin, ranging from excerpts taken from Olaudah Equiano's eighteenth-century narrative to documents concerning the Benin massacre of 1897. Those documents concerning a neighboring Bantu society were included in large part because of the paucity of known late nineteenth-century documents concerning the Congo by black Africans--or indeed by black observers of any nationality. In place of those Benin-related materials, this new edition includes substantial excerpts from George Washington Williams's Letter to Leopold II, as well as substantial excerpts from an extraordinary document not included in any other edition of Heart of Darkness(but discussed extensively in two ground-breaking twenty-first century works of scholarship, David Van Reybrouck's Congo: The Epic History of a Peopleand Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World): the autobiography of Disasi Makulo. Makulo grew up near the shore of the Congo River in the 1880s and early 1890s, was enslaved by notorious ivory dealer Tippu Tip, and then was taken under the wing of Henry Morton Stanley. Makulo's account--substantial excerpts of which are here translated into English for the first time--opens an unprecedented window on life in the equatorial forest of the Congo in the late nineteenth century.

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Library Journal Review

Hesperus's centenary edition of the Conrad classic also includes The Congo Diary and Up-River Book, which essentially are notes from his six-month stay in the Congo in 1890. His travels there and sojourn on the river apparently served as the inspiration for the novel. The book also features introductions for Heart and The Congo Diary as well as textual notes for all sections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.