More insightful third edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, edited by Prof. Goonetilleke
View(s):The third edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, edited by Prof. D.C. R. A. Goonetilleke, has come out with substantial new material not included in any other edition of the great novella. This Broadview Press bestseller (previously published in 1995 and 1999) comes 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 new edition includes 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 21st-first century works of scholarship, David Van Reybrouck’s Congo: The Epic History of a People and 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 Morgan 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.
Caryl Phillips of the Yale University said that “(it) is difficult to imagine a more complete, or authoritative, edition of Heart of Darkness. An elegant, and informative essay introduces the text, but it is the two hundred pages of context which distinguishes this edition from others … (and) give us a fully nuanced picture of Conrad, the Congo, and contemporary attitudes to race, imperialism and exploration.”
The book, priced at Rs. 3000, can be transferred to any of the island-wide branches of Sarasavi Bookshop via imports@sarasavi.lk. Also available at their branches at Nugegoda and Shangri-La Hotel/One Galle Face.