Abstract The present study offers an analytical nucleus of Joseph Conrad’s polemical novella Heart of Darkness (1899) that weaves and interweaves between Victorianism and Modernism, capturing the zeitgeist of its time. This is particularly punctuated through the way the novella’s characters epitomize Victorian notions of the collective consciousness of British imperialism, along with Conrad’s transcendental experimental style that emblematizes the rudiments of his modern narrative technique. Within this rationale, this study aims to elucidate the credibility of appropriating an interdisciplinary eclectic set of modernist-iconoclastic readings, by utilizing a postcolonial appropriation, as in Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of mimicry. More importantly, this study will propose an exploratory explication of colonial mimicry, along with its significant conceptual staples of postcolonialism; slippage, Trompe l’oeil, and the dialectical inclusionism/exclusionism, parsed with Hegel’s accentuation of master/slave dialectic. In consequence, the overarching goal of this study recapitulates that the novella is veritably timelier than ever, as its spectrum analysis still warrants a bevy of deconstructive re-readings of supremacist ideologies and colonialist/imperialist dimensions within contemporaneous contexts.
Amireh et al. (Wed,) studied this question.