This book is an intriguing and intimate study of the dialogues forged between different forms

of art, paintings and texts in particular. It entwines art with literature to create a complex yet

marvellous mosaic of textures hitherto undiscussed in this manner. Reading, here, becomes

both painting and travelling through Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the works of the

French Impressionist painters of the nineteenth century. Through an exploration of the

distinctive characteristics of the paintings of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne and

even Van Gogh and Gauguin, this book tries to decipher the codes and symbols of Conrad’s

enigmatic novella. By taking the help of intertextuality, interdisciplinary and

multidisciplinary approaches, detours and retours through time and space, this book offers

extensive readings of texts on art, literature and Conrad’s works. Reading Heart of Darkness

in this manner emerges as a kind of journey through the continents of imperial Europe and of

colonized Africa, through diverse cultures, imaginary geographies, psychological processes

that separate one human from another, through the metaphors and metonymies of the modern

malaise that vacillated from Darwinian theories of evolution to Nietzsche’s proclamation of

the death of God.