WRITERS AND THEIR WORLDS: HEART OF DARKNESS BY JOSEPH CONRAD AND THINGS FALL APART BY CHINUA ACHEBE

Cultural values, customs, traditions, and points of view or approaches to certain issues change over time. Literary works, as the products of their own periods, carry valuable information that reflect social, political, and economic conditions of their times. The aim of this study is to show that both Conrad and Achebe, due to their background and the discourse they lived in, had different approaches regarding Africa and its residents when they wrote their novels Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, respectively. Furthermore, this study also aims at refuting Achebe’s accusation that Conrad was a bloody-racist when he penned Heart of Darkness since discourses of different periods do not have to create subjects thinking or evaluating situations in the same manner. The approach used for the analysis of the two novels is historical-biographical approach since it is expected that this method will reveal the conditions and the ideology of each period exclusively.