This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• A newly edited text based on the first English book edition (1902), the last version to which Conrad is known to have actively contributed.
• "Textual History and Editing Principles" provides an overview of the textual controversies and ambiguities perpetually surrounding Heart of Darkness.
• Background and source materials on colonialism and the Congo, nineteenth-century attitudes toward race, Conrad in the Congo, and Conrad on art and literature.
• Fifteen illustrations.
• Seven contemporary responses to the novella along with eighteen essays in criticism-ten of them new to the Fifth Edition, including an entirely new subsection on film adaptations of Heart of Darkness.
• A Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography.