Conrad’s best known work is Heart of Darkness, which he first published in 1899 and is based on his experience in the Congo. They were after its rich resources like ivory, palm oil, cotton, gold, diamonds, and rubber.Ĭonrad briefly worked on a Belgian steamship that was exporting ivory out of the Congo Free State, located in central Africa. In the late 1800s, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Italy were in the process of colonizing the African continent. Many European countries were establishing overseas colonies around the globe. Zachary Davis: Conrad was writing in the late 19th and early 20th century during the height of European colonialism. I'm Maya Jasanoff, I'm a professor of history at Harvard. But I would say that, you know, perhaps a better way to think about it is that his novels often have a kind of, some sort of political element in them. And that's because a lot of them do have, you know, these non-European settings and feature sailors and so on. Maya Jasanoff: They were often regarded in the generation or so after him as adventure novels or sea stories or books that were geared toward boys. By the time he died, in 1924, he had written 20 books, as well as many stories and essays.
He became a sailor at the age of 17, and his experiences at sea and abroad provided much of the inspiration for his later writing career. Zachary Davis: Joseph Conrad spent much of his life on the water.
0 kommentar(er)
