It is better to analyze the works Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India, applying the historical and cultural conditions of the society in which they were produced. The relationships between groups and classes of people that imperialism establishes, and that these two works explore, starkly reveal the contradictions within capitalism in a way that a similar piece of fiction set within a culture and dealing with characters from that culture alone cannot. Before the analysis, however, I would like to give a brief and relevant explanation of the Marxist approach to the analysis of literature and the terms I will use. After years of study and research, Karl Marx published the first volume of his monumental Das Kapital in 1867. In it Marx presents his theory of the materialist conception of history in which the economic basis of a society gives rise to and interacts dialectically with the social superstructure of culture, law, religion and art. Among other things, Das Kapital traces the historical development of industrial capitalism as arising from feudalism, predicts the further evolution of capitalism, and expounds theories of class structure and class struggle. He also criticizes the methods by which industrial capitalism organizes the means of production so that capital and labor are separated and held by distinct, antagonistic groups within society. This separation overwhelmingly benefits the holders of capital, politically and economically, to the detriment of those who sell their labor. While this is by no means an adequate summary of Marx's ideas and contributions, my aim is to provide this simple theoretical framework within which to focus on more particular elements of Marxist theory. For…half of the paper…I believe that imperial rule, though inevitable in the short term, was an inglorious undertaking which deformed both those who ruled and those who submitted" (153). Joseph Conrad and E.M. Forster were two of these artists and that the two works in question reflected their growing awareness of imperialism as an "inglorious enterprise", whether this was consciously expressed by the authors or not. This study will attempt to clarify the ways in which each work supports and subverts the imperial mission and its ideology and I will also speculate to some extent about how these contradictions in the works reflect the contradictions in the society in which they were written. Works Cited: Conrad, James, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories Britain, paperback BPC ltd. Forster, EM A passage to India: Harcourt Brace, 1984.