This text has been criticised for the way it uses Africa as the uncivilised other to Western society: Chinue Achebe, in his 1975 lecture on the book called it “offensive and deplorable,” arguing that it de-humanises Africans. The figure of Kurtz, an ivory trader stationed in Africa, is a monstrous representation of Western avarice and corruption, yet, troublingly, some of the biggest horrors to his characterisation are in the representations of his having “gone native” displaying severed heads on poles outside his residence. This narrative framing serves two purposes it links the “darkness” of London to the “darkness” in the heart of Africa, questioning the distinctions between the civilised and the uncivilised, and it creates a story within a story that gives the impression of a journey into the deeper recesses of individual and social psychology. He recounts his tale to his shipmates aboard the Nellie, which is docked in London. It is a story about a journey up the Congo river and into the heart of Africa as told by the character of Marlow. Published in 1899, this novella marks a turning point into the modernist era. For a more in-depth review, Jeanette Winterson’s introduction to the new editions is a beautiful read, which you can find HERE. It is also a poetic, modernist masterpiece. Matthew O’ Connor remarks: “Nora will leave that girl some day but though those two are buried at the opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both.” This novella is known as one of the earliest works to centre on explicit homosexuality and transsexuality, and numbers among the greatest works of queer fiction. In spite of their difficulties, they are bound together in a love worthy of greatness. Nora Flood (widely believed to be a thinly veiled version of Djuna Barnes herself) is a woman deeply in love with Robin, and tormented by her lover’s free nature. It tells the story of the mesmerising Robin Vote, who leaves a trail of cigarette ends and empty bottles through the lives of the other characters as she flies from one party to another, one romance to another. Published in 1936, Nightwood is a haze of alcohol, glamour, sex, and love in all its desperate, unconventional, and painful forms.
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