 Said 's first published book , Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography ( 1966 ) , was an expansion of the dissertation he presented to earn his PhD ; later , in Edward Saïd : Criticism and Society ( 2010 ) , Abdirahman Hussein would remark that Conrad 's novella Heart of Darkness ( 1899 ) was " foundational to Said 's entire career and project " . Afterwards , Said redacted ideas gleaned from the works of the 17th @-@ century philosopher Giambattista Vico , and other intellectuals , in the book Beginnings : Intention and Method ( 1974 ) , about the theoretical bases of literary criticism . Said 's later works include The World , the Text , and the Critic ( 1983 ) , Nationalism , Colonialism , and Literature : Yeats and Decolonization ( 1988 ) , Culture and Imperialism ( 1993 ) , Representations of the Intellectual : The 1993 Reith Lectures ( 1994 ) , Humanism and Democratic Criticism ( 2004 ) , and On Late Style ( 2006 ) . 
