Live March 19th, 2021 at 5:00 PM!
“Heart of Darkness” is one of the most culturally significant texts in the English canon from the 20th century. Its place in the canon is also under fire as a politically and culturally sensitive text. This examination stems from work for a chapter I published in the volume Critical Insights: Heart of Darkness with Gale this year. The discussion examines changes and differences between the manuscript version of “Heart of Darkness” held at Yale’s Beinecke library, and Conrad's novel print version. It charts some of the interesting omissions of manuscript material from the final version, focusing on the treatment of Kurtz, and Marlowe's first encounter with Africa, the emergence of some of the novella's most iconic moments, and examines sequences where Conrad polishes the original manuscript text to achieve clarity and effect.
Presenter: Dr. David Mulry
Title: Professor of English
Department: Arts & Humanities
Email: dmulry@ccga.edu
Biography:
Dr. David Mulry is a Professor of English at the College of Coastal Georgia. He previously worked in broadcasting with the BBC. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kent, Canterbury. He previously taught in Greece, France, and the UK, before teaching in the USA. He has published on manuscript revision, along with political fiction, gender and colonialism, on modern and Romantic poetry, and on literary Modernism. His book Conrad Among the Anarchists was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. He has recently published articles on Conrad’s short fiction, “Heart of Darkness,” and most recently a newly discovered letter by the author. He is scheduled to complete his new book, Terrorism and the late nineteenth and early twentieth century novel (Palgrave MacMillan) later this year.