This article seeks to explain the prevalence and significance of tropical forest settings and symbolism in the fiction of Joseph Conrad and other authors. It follows up the argument made by Corinne J. Saunders in The Forest of Medieval Romance (1993) that literary forests were once used to explore the concept of unordered matter and to integrate it into the Christian worldview. The contention of this article is that Darwinian ideas and waning religious belief in late-nineteenth-century Britain prompted renewed anxieties about chaotic nature, and thus a revival of the convention of the tangled wilderness. While many Victorian-Edwardian authors conjure fallen but redeemable jungles as a way of staving off the materialism of natural selection and justifying the purposive alternative of Lamarckian evolutionary theory, Conrad's forest is more unorthodox, ambiguous, and far less encouraging.

本文试图解释约瑟夫·康拉德（Joseph Conrad）等作家的小说中热带森林环境和象征主义的盛行和意义。它遵循了科琳·桑德斯（Corinne J. Saunders）在《中世纪浪漫之林》中的论点（1993），文学森林曾经被用来探索无序物质的概念，并将其整合到基督教的世界观中。本文的论点是，在19世纪后期的英国，达尔文主义的思想和宗教信仰的衰落促使人们对混乱的自然重新产生了焦虑，从而使纠结的旷野习俗得以复兴。尽管许多维多利亚·爱德华七世时代的作者都想起了倒塌但可赎回的丛林，以避开自然选择的唯物主义，并为拉马克进化论的有目的的选择辩护，但康拉德的森林更加不合常规，模棱两可，而且远没有那么令人鼓舞。