SOURCE: Watts, Cedric. “Heart of Darkness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, edited by J. H. Stape, pp. 45-62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Watts traces the critical reaction to Heart of Darkness and places the novella within the nineteenth-century literary tradition.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a rich, vivid, layered, paradoxical, and problematic novella or long tale; a mixture of oblique autobiography, traveller's yarn, adventure story, psychological odyssey, political satire, symbolic prose-poem, black comedy, spiritual melodrama, and sceptical meditation. It has proved to be ‘ahead of its times’: an exceptionally proleptic text. First published in 1899 as a serial in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, it became extensively influential during subsequent decades, and reached a zenith of critical acclaim in the period 1950-75. During the final quarter of the twentieth century, however, while its influence became even more pervasive, the tale was vigorously assailed on political...