Dec 21, 2009

Heart of Darkness | Social Concerns

The combined exploitative forces of capitalism and imperialism are the objects of Conrad's social criticism in Heart of Darkness, objects that, in varied contexts and settings, he would fix upon in much of his work. In this tale, quarried from his own Congo adventure (1890), Conrad focuses his moral irony on the universe at large and the hollow conventions by which men seek to deal with it. Among the forces at work in the novella are the International Association for the Civilization of Central Africa, founded by the Belgian King Leopold II in 1875 and having as one of its tenets the...