Owen Knowles – författare

A haunting Modernist masterpiece and the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar-winning film Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness explores the limits of human experience and the nightmarish realities of imperialism. Conrad's narrator Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey in search of the infamous ivory trader Kurtz: dying, insane, and guilty of unspeakable atrocities. Travelling upriver to the heart of the African continent, he gradually becomes obsessed by this enigmatic, wraith-like figure. Marlow's discovery of how Kurtz has gained his position of power over the local people involves him in a radical questioning, not only of his own nature and values, but also those of western civilisation. Part of a major series of new editions of Conrad's most famous works in Penguin Classics, this volume contains Conrad's Congo Diary, a chronology, further reading, notes, a map of the Congo, a glossary and an introduction discussing the author's experiences in Africa, the narrative and symbolic complexities of Heart of Darkness and critical responses to the novel.Edited with an introduction by Owen Knowles'Seems to reach into the heart of Conrad himself' Peter Ackroyd

'Scholarly, ambitious and scrupulous'. This is how the TLS recently described the Oxford Reader's Companion Series.In September 2000, the book which pioneered the series, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens came out in paperback. Now the Oxford Reader's Companions to Hardy, Trollope, Conrad, and George Eliot will follow on from that success. In this format these books are designed specifically to appeal to students of literature. Each contains a more comprehensive and accessible range of information than any other reference work on these writers.Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski had an astonishing life. 'Pole, Catholic, and nobleman' is how he described himself as at the age of 5. He was born in the Ukraine of Polish parents and spent his childhood in exile. It was only after fifteen years at sea that he began writing in English, his third language and the one whose genius had, as he put it, 'adopted' him. Owen Knowles and Gene M. Moore, together with their team of distinguished Advisers and Contributors, have created a unique and authoritative reference work on all things Conradian.Over 400 entries cover Conrad's novels, stories, essays, and reviews; his friends, family, and associates; films and adaptations; ships and voyages; places associated with his life and works; his influences and sources; his reputation and critical approaches to his work; historical contexts to his life.Entries include: Conrad's life: health, Polish inheritance, the sea, ships and voyagesPeople: Borys Conrad, Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, J. M. Barrie, Stephen Crane, Stefan ZeromskiPlaces: America, Bangkok, Berdyczow, Congo, Cracow, Marseilles Novels: Almayer's Folly, Lord Jim, NostromoStories, essays, and reviews: 'An Anarchist', 'Typhoon', 'Autocracy and War', 'Legends', 'Tales of the Sea'Influences and Sources: James Brooke, Alighieri Dante, Charles Dickens, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emile ZolaCharacters: Almayer family, Mr Jones, Jim, Captain Mitchell, Nostromo, the Professor, Edith TraversReputation: biographies, films, influences on other writers, portraits and other images, translationsHistorical context: First World War, Polish question, women's suffrage movementIn addition to the A-Z entries the Companion offers extra material: a classified contents list with headwords grouped in thematic batches, Conrad's family tree, a useful chronology spanning Conrad's life, maps showing Conrad's travels, an index of references to Conrad's works, and an alphabetical list of frequently cited texts.

This chronology is designed to provide a digest of Conrad's life as it develops from year to year. It is written as a series of diary or chronicle entries and thus caters for the reader who may wish to check a single fact. The main contents are supplemented by a "Who's Who" and indexes which provide easy access to a wider range of information.

'Youth', Heart of Darkness and 'The End of the Tether' make up Conrad's most celebrated collection of short narratives. Heart of Darkness forms its sombre centrepiece: set in the Congo of the 1890s, this haunting and widely influential Modernist masterpiece explores the limits of human experience as well as the nightmarish realities and consequences of imperialism. The Cambridge edition presents this trio of stories and Conrad's preface to the collection in forms more authoritative than any so far published. The introduction situates the stories in Conrad's publishing career, traces their sources and surveys contemporary reception. The edition includes detailed explanatory and contextual notes, a glossary of nautical terms, maps and illustrations. A textual essay and comprehensive apparatus reveal the history of each story's composition, revision and publication. This volume will allow scholars to see these familiar stories in a fresh light, by returning to Conrad's original texts.

This volume presents all known Conrad letters from the years 1917-1919 in a framework which highlights their literary, historical, cultural, and biographical significance. Like its predecessors, this volume includes a high proportion of previously unpublished letters, and many of those already published have appeared only in small-circulation journals. Again like its predecessors, this volume is full of surprises that require us to remould our understanding of Conrad's writings. His correspondence for these years reveals his state of mind as he and his family dealt with the constant anxieties of the war-time years, and the return to a fragile peace. During this time, Conrad published three novels - The Shadow-Line, The Arrow of Gold, and The Rescue - together with a considerable amount of shorter work, was preparing for the publication of his collected works on both sides of the Atlantic, and was engaged in a critical rereading of his earlier books.

The last volume in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad presents over two hundred new letters written between 1892 and 1923. Some are to correspondents who have not previously appeared in the collected letters; others are to family members, friends, and colleagues familiar from earlier volumes. Many of the letters in both categories are substantial enough to justify a recharting of Conrad's work, his friendships, his experiences, and his opinions on such subjects as opera, marriage, editorial tampering, the reading public, British foreign policy, the consolations and the penalties of faith, the Dutch Empire, translating Maupassant, the power of oratory, the revolutions of 1917, and the deficiencies of Ibsen's Ghosts. This volume holds enough surprises to suggest that there can never be a final word on Conrad and includes indexes and further apparatus for the whole series.

'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.

'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.