SOURCE: “Narrators and Readers: 1902 and 1975,” in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 20, No. 3, July, 1989, pp. 19-36.

In the following essay, Lenta compares and contrasts Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Jhabvala's Heat and Dust in an effort to expound Michael Echeruo's notion of “literatures which were originally conceived of in tribal contexts that have now become international and cross-cultural.”

In his book The Conditioned Imagination from Shakespeare to Conrad Michael Echeruo discusses the idea that “literatures which were originally conceived of in tribal (ie. national) contexts have now become international and cross-cultural” (10). He is writing of the spread of the English language; once the language of England, it has become the mother tongue of many other groups and the literary dialect of still more. Echeruo claims that writers who conceived of their readers as members of their own group characteristically demanded of them, as well as...