Heart of Darkness, The Man Who Would Be King, and Other Works on Empire

by David Damrosch (Editor), Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad

From Longman's Cultural Editions series , Heart of Darkness, The Man Who Would Be King, and Other Works on Empire shows the literary and historical context within which―and against which―both Conrad and Kipling wrote their masterpieces. These works have deeply influenced later writings that deal with the ambitions, complexities, and failures of imperial projects of cultural influence and political control. English, American, South Asian, and African authors from Saul Bellow to Salman Rushdie have worked with and against the models pioneered by Conrad and Kipling in the late Victorian era; their revolutionary impact is illuminated in this text.

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2006

About the author

A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, David Damrosch has written widely on comparative and world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2008). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011), and Xin fangxiang: bijiao wenxue yu shijie wenxue duben [New Directions: A Reader of Comparative and World Literature], Peking U. P., 2010. He is presently completing a book entitled Comparing the Literatures: What Every Comparatist Needs to Know, and starting a book on the role of global scripts in the formation of national literatures.