Publisher's Synopsis
Heart of Darkness was published in 1902 as a novella in Youth: And Two Other Stories, a collection that included two other stories by Conrad. But the text first appeared in 1899 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, a literary monthly on its thousandth issue, to which its editor invited Conrad to contribute. Conrad was hesitant to do so, perhaps for good reason-although Heart of Darkness received acclaim among his own literary circle, the story failed to secure any kind of popular success. That remained the case even when it was published in 1902; Heart of Darkness received the least attention out of the three stories included, and the collection was eponymously named after another one of the stories altogether. Conrad didn't live long enough to see it become a popular success.
Heart of Darkness first began garnering academic attention in the 1940 and '50s, at a time when literary studies were dominated by a psychologically oriented approach to the interpretation of literature. Heart of Darkness was, accordingly, understood as a universalist exploration of human interiority-of its corruptibility, its inaccessibility, and the darkness inherent to it. There was something lacking in these critiques, of course: any kind of examination of the novella's message about colonialism or its use of Africa and its people as an indistinct backdrop against which to explore the complexities of the white psyche.
That changed in the 1970s when Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart, leveled an excoriating critique against Heart of Darkness for the way it dehumanized African people. Achebe's critique opened the doors for further postcolonial analyses of the work, was followed by those from other academic perspectives: feminist readings, for example, revealed a similar kind of effacement done unto its female subjects. Although Heart of Darkness has remained on many syllabi since the 1970s, it now occupies a much more controversial position in the Western canon: as a story that, while leveling critiques against colonialism that were novel for its time, and which was formative for the emergence of modernism in literature, is still deeply and inexcusably entrenched in the white male perspective.