Journal archive

Abstract: The article aims to analyze how the intertextual connections help the contemporary British writer Robert Edric to reveal some post-colonial issues in his novel The Book of the Heathen (2000). The author of the article makes a conclusion that the parallels with the main pretext – Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – can be traced on the level of the chronotope, plot elements and system of characters and motifs at the ideological-thematic and linguistic levels. Nevertheless, Edric’s The Book of the Heathen shows greater interest in the specific socio-political agenda and the role of the church in colonization, and the guilt of Britain and other European states in the situation in Congo at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and later. The contemporary piece of literature reflects disillusionment with the ideas of “colonization for the sake of civilization”, based on its disappointing results. Edric's novel is also notable for its condemnation of racism. Other intertextual references – to biblical texts, R. Casement’s diary, fictionalized biographies of explorers of Africa – also contribute to the representation of post-colonial issues, reflecting the writer’s protest against the vices of the colonial system, the corruption of the colonial government, Eurocentrism, and the idea of the superiority of the white race.

About the author(s) :

Anna A. Ilunina

Voronezh State Forestry Engineering University named after G. F. Morozov (Voronezh, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3871-7555

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 07.10.2023; date of publication: 28.12.2024

References:

Abu-Snoubar, T. (2017). Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Debanking the Two Basic Imperial Clichés. In European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies. No. 5, pp. 1–11.

Achebe, Ch. (1978). An Image of Africa. In Research of African Literatures. Vol. 9. No. 1.

Bassett, T. (1994). Cartography and Empire Building in Nineteenth-Century West Africa. In Geographical review. No. 84 (3), pp. 322–323.

Blinova, M. P., Chekalova, A. S. (2016). Mifopoeticheskoe prostranstvo v povesti Dzhozefa Konrada «Serdtse t'my» [Mithopoetic Space of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”]. In Sovremennye tendentsii razvitiya nauki i tekhnologii. No. 10 (6), pp. 22–26.

Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2009). Bloom’s Guide Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. New York, Infobase Publishing. 120 p.

Conrad, J. (2010). Heart of Darkness. London, Penguin. 13 p. URL: https://celz.ru/joseph-conrad/34062- heart_of_darkness.html (mode of access: 12.12.2022).

Edric, R. (2000). The Book of the Heathen. New York, St. Martin’s Press. URL: https://celz.ru/robert-edric/426320- the_book_of_the_heathen.html (mode of access: 12.12.2022).

Firchow, P. (2000). Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Lexington, University of Kentucky Press. 258 p.

Harley, J. B. (1989). Deconstructing the Map. In Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization. No. 26 (2), pp. 1–20.

Heilmann, A., Llewellyn, M. (2010). Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. 353 р.

Jeal, T. (2007). Stanley. The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. London, Faber and Faber. xix, 570 p. Meyers, J. (1973). Conrad and Roger Casement. In Conradiana. Vol. 5. No. 3, pp. 64–69.

Murfin, R. C. (1989). Psychoanalytic Criticism and Heart of Darkness. In A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. New York, St. Martin’s Press, pp. 113–123.

Page, N. (1986). A Conrad Companion. New York, Palgrave MacMillan. 200 p. Rennison, N. (2005). Contemporary British Novelists. London, Routledge, pp. 61–65.

Roos, H. (2009). The Sins of the Fathers: The Missionary in Some Modern English Novels about the Congo. In Tydskrif vir Letterkunde. Vol. 46. URL: https://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php&script=sci_arttext&pid=S0041- 476X2009000100005 (mode of access: 12.10.2022).

Said, E. W. (1993). Two Visions in Heart of Darkness. In Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, pp. 19–31.

Scott, E. (2014). ‘We were again on the trail of cannibals’: Consuming Trauma and Frustrating Exoticism in Robert Edric’s The Book of the Heathen. In Rousselot, E. (Ed.). Exoticizing the Past in the Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 69–83.

Skorokhodko, Yu. S. (2013). Kolonial'nye motivy v angliiskom neoviktorianskom romane: k postanovke problemy [Colonial Motives in the English Neo-Victorian Novel: To Posing a Problem]. In Pitannya literaturoznavstva. Issue 88, pp. 200–209.

Taylor, D. J. (2006). History’s Half-light: Gathering the Water by Robert Edric Review. In The Guardian. June 24.

Tolkachev, S. P. (2019). «Puteshestvie v serdtse t'my»: travestiya traditsionnykh syuzhetov v tvorchestve mul'tikul'turnykh pisatelei [“The Journey to the Heart of Darkness”: Travesty of Traditional Plots in the Works of Multicultural Writers]. In Vestnik Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo lingvisticheskogo universiteta. Gumanitarnye nauki. Issue 5 (821), pp. 301–312.

Xin, Sun. (2018). Feminism Interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s Works – Taking Heart of Darkness as an Example. In Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research. Vol. 264, pp. 1053–1056.