Review by Choice Review
Undergraduate courses designed to introduce students to the study of literature or, more particularly, to the study of critical approaches to fiction, would find Murfin's collection of essays on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness a useful text. The essays, written by five respected critics (including Federick R. Karl) specifically for this collection, are designed to model each of five current critical schools: the psychoanalytic, reader-response, feminist, deconstructive, and new historicist perspectives. Murfin introduces the collection with a history of 20th-century criticism that beginners will find helpful, and prefaces each of the essays with his own commentary on the techniques of the critical approach being illustrated. The volume also includes the text of Conrad's masterpiece with a detailed review of the biographical and historical context of the story, and a glossary of key terms used in the literature of contemporary literary theory and criticism. Murfin (Univeristy of Miami) is also the editor of Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties (1985), and the author of books on Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. P. D. O'Connor Aquinas College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Hesperus's centenary edition of the Conrad classic also includes The Congo Diary and Up-River Book, which essentially are notes from his six-month stay in the Congo in 1890. His travels there and sojourn on the river apparently served as the inspiration for the novel. The book also features introductions for Heart and The Congo Diary as well as textual notes for all sections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
