A haunting Modernist masterpiece and the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar-winning film Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness explores the limits of human experience and the nightmarish realities of imperialism. Conrad's narrator Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey in search of the infamous ivory trader Kurtz: dying, insane, and guilty of unspeakable atrocities. Travelling upriver to the heart of the African continent, he gradually becomes obsessed by this enigmatic, wraith-like figure. Marlow's discovery of how Kurtz has gained his position of power over the local people involves him in a radical questioning, not only of his own nature and values, but also those of western civilisation. Part of a major series of new editions of Conrad's most famous works in Penguin Classics, this volume contains Conrad's Congo Diary, a chronology, further reading, notes, a map of the Congo, a glossary and an introduction discussing the author's experiences in Africa, the narrative and symbolic complexities of Heart of Darkness and critical responses to the novel. Edited with an introduction by Owen Knowles 'Seems to reach into the heart of Conrad himself' Peter Ackroyd

This chronology is designed to provide a digest of Conrad's life as it develops from year to year. It is written as a series of diary or chronicle entries and thus caters for the reader who may wish to check a single fact. The main contents are supplemented by a "Who's Who" and indexes.

With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull. Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer. Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world. When Vanity Fair was published in 1848, Charlotte Bronte commented: 'The more I read Thackeray'sworks the more certain I am that he stands alone - alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling... Thackeray is a Titan.'

This chronology is designed to provide a digest of Conrad's life as it develops from year to year. It is written as a series of diary or chronicle entries and thus caters for the reader who may wish to check a single fact. The main contents are supplemented by a "Who's Who" and indexes which provide easy access to a wider range of information.

'I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold'. Charles Marlow's dark intuition here arrives at the culmination of his physical and psychological quest in search of the infamous ivory-trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's most famous short story, Heart of Darkness. Ambiguously drawn to the powerful 'voice' of this autocratic European who has become a self-proclaimed ruler in an African colony, Marlow is increasingly embroiled in Kurtz's life and death: he is finally forced into a radical questioning, not only of his own assumptions, but also of the civilized and imperial pretensions of Western Europe. Offering a freshly-researched text based on the writer's original documents, this edition presents a classic of early modernist fiction in a version that, for the first time, recovers Conrad's preferred wordings, punctuation and narrative structure.

'Youth', Heart of Darkness and 'The End of the Tether' make up Conrad's most celebrated collection of short narratives. Heart of Darkness forms its sombre centrepiece: set in the Congo of the 1890s, this haunting and widely influential Modernist masterpiece explores the limits of human experience as well as the nightmarish realities and consequences of imperialism. The Cambridge edition presents this trio of stories and Conrad's preface to the collection in forms more authoritative than any so far published. The introduction situates the stories in Conrad's publishing career, traces their sources and surveys contemporary reception. The edition includes detailed explanatory and contextual notes, a glossary of nautical terms, maps and illustrations. A textual essay and comprehensive apparatus reveal the history of each story's composition, revision and publication. This volume will allow scholars to see these familiar stories in a fresh light, by returning to Conrad's original texts.

The very successful Oxford Reader's Companion series, described recently in the TLS as 'scholarly, ambitious and scrupulous', is now available in paperback. 'Lively and thorough' says the Library Journal of the Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad. Bringing together all of the best scholarship around on this compelling and complex figure in English literature, this handy paperback edition of thisCompanion will prove invaluable to students of 19th-century Victorian fiction.