Late nineteenth-century imperial adventure fiction for boy readers is known for its depiction of British travelers’ attempt at their own imperial regeneration, which takes the form of conquering Africa. In reducing Africa into an empty space that is immature, primitive, and therefore ahistoric, the travelers wish to separate the modern present in England from the prehistoric past in Africa. However, by reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness (1899) through the lens of age and postcolonial criticism, my article shows that it is the British Empire’s own age consciousness that is projected onto her agent’s perception of Africa as a symbol of immaturity in the late nineteenth century, a time period marked by anxieties of degeneration. The article looks at how Conrad questions childish aspects of the European traveler’s fantasy of imperial regeneration in letting him feel oppressed by—fail to destroy—the power of the old landscape in Africa. Ultimately, the article contends that in Conrad’s Darkness, the old African landscape acts as an antagonist, who puts on display the traveler’s vulnerability to degeneration and therefore testifies to the impossibility of unstoppable development on the part of European empires.

中文翻译：

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约瑟夫康拉德黑暗之心中的年龄语言

19 世纪晚期面向男孩读者的帝国冒险小说以其描绘英国旅行者试图以征服非洲的形式重建帝国而闻名。在将非洲缩小为一个不成熟、原始、因此没有历史意义的空旷空间时，旅行者希望将英格兰的现代现在与非洲的史前历史区分开来。然而，通过从时代和后殖民批评的角度阅读约瑟夫·康拉德的《黑暗之心》（1899），我的文章表明，正是大英帝国自己的时代意识投射到她的代理人将非洲视为晚期不成熟的象征的看法上。 19 世纪，一个以退化焦虑为标志的时期。这篇文章着眼于康拉德如何质疑欧洲旅行者关于帝国复兴的幻想中的幼稚方面，让他感到被非洲古老景观的力量压迫——未能摧毁——。最后，文章认为，在康拉德的黑暗中，古老的非洲景观充当了一个对手，它展示了旅行者对堕落的脆弱性，因此证明了欧洲帝国不可能实现不可阻挡的发展。