Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now We do not generally link the dark vision of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" to the fripperies of Jane Austen, but we should do so because these writers can be seen as important bookmarks to the era of the modern novel and we cannot understand Conrad's work without understanding its connections to his time. By looking back to a writer like Austen we can seen how much had changed in the world at large and in the world of the novel during the Victorian era and the ways in which authors had begun to lose faith in the power of language to represent, to contain and to describe language.

We cannot understand Conrad's relationship to language without understanding the larger context within which literature was created and consumed. From the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until her death in 1901, was an era...
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