In fading light on the Thames Estuary near London, as Charles Marlow and his companions relax on deck, waiting for the turn of the tide, he tells of the time he turned 'freshwater sailor' on the River Congo. His perilous journey upriver in a little steamboat with a band of white colonialists and a group of cannibals takes him closer to the coveted ivory, closer to Kurtz the rogue agent, closer to certain unspeakable rites and the heart of darkness. Here we encounter the darkness of the jungle; the darkness of forced labour, cruelty, and death; and that darkness that exists in the 'civilized' human heart. Serialised in three parts in 1899, this book was first published in 1902. Joseph Conrad, considered one of greatest novelists in the English language, was born in Poland in 1857, only learning to speak the language fluently in his 20s and always with a strong Polish accent. Frequently, he touches on themes connected with the sea and colonialism, for he had travelled the world as a merchant seaman. He had even skippered a steamboat called Roi des Belges in King Leopold II's private fiefdom of the Congo; these experiences and encounters find a home in this most disturbing and claustrophobic of stories.
100 Meisterwerke der englischen Literatur - Klassiker, die man kennen muss
George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, H.P. Lovecraft, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Burns, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jerome K Jerome, Washington Irving, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Daniel Defoe, Lew Wallace, James Fenimore Cooper, Jonathan Swift, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Lewis Carrol, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau, G.K. Chesterton, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Margaret Mitchell, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, John Galsworthy, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Rudyard Kipling
