Abstract
Born in the mid-nineteenth century and living on into the 1920s, Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) witnessed major technological revolutions in transportation, electricity, weaponry, and communications. Most of his fiction incorporates both new and older technologies, but Heart of Darkness (1899) and Nostromo (1903–4) particularly register the emergent transportation technologies and networks of the late nineteenth century: the railway and steam shipping. These works seem neutral, however, on a question that fascinated Conrad’s nineteenth-century contemporaries: is technology inherently good or bad? From the 1830s, this debate was structured by responses to the ‘factory question’.1 Many Victorian thinkers, especially those involved in capitalist or industrial endeavours, saw technology as an integral part of culture, which catalysed social progress and was, therefore, beneficial to humanity.2 Others saw technology as inherently harmful to humankind. For the Victorian literary intelligentsia, mechanical technology was the demonic spectre haunting ‘progress’ and threatening to destroy culture.3 This good/bad dichotomy in responses to the question was produced by a focus on the physical and social impact of manufacturing technologies as physical objects. Conrad changes the parameters of the conversation by considering transport technologies rather than manufacturing technologies with their accretions of meaning along the good/bad axis.
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call