Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from the viewpoint of New Historicism, which proposes the interpretation of a literary text through its historical and cultural contexts. In this study, to put Conrad’s text in its cultural context, some non-literary texts written in the period, which saw the colonial expansion of England, and during which, Conrad wrote the novel, have been chosen. Constituting the English colonial discourse, these texts all deal with the encounter between the European and the African. The aim of this parallel reading is to determine the place of Conrad’s text in the English colonial discourse and to show how Conrad reflected, in his novel, the colonial deeds of the European in Africa. At the end of the study, it has been concluded that though employing the themes related with “colonialism” and “imperialism”, Conrad subverted them, in his text and that Conrad put them in his text only to subvert and demythologize them. Reflecting the colonial deeds of the white man as nothing more than violence, savagery, theft, greed and barbarism, Conrad made a powerful response against the pervasive ideologies reflected in the cultural discourses of the age.