No description available.

This thesis seeks to offer an explicitly political reading of E.M. Forster's fiction, focusing on three of his novels (A Room with a View, Howards End and Maurice) and two of his short stories ("The Life to Come" and "The Other Boat"). Throughout I have used a combination of close reading techniques and elements of critical theory to show how Forster's fiction is characterised by a prolonged and ongoing analysis of the political notion of the intersection of mainstream and marginal cultures. In this regard, I argue that the majority of Forster's novels and short stories are concerned with issues surrounding characters who are somehow marginalised from mainstream power structures and who then have to rebel against the cultural centre in their personal quests for political autonomy. It is this cultural issue, I argue, that gives Forster's novels and short stories their thematic unity and continuity. In probing this theme, I hope to move beyond restrictive (and often reductive) liberal humanist styles of criticism, which tend to downplay the political implications of Forster's fiction by fore grounding only the metaphysical questions posed by his writing. However, this thesis is also informed by certain deconstructive theoretical concepts, which I have loosely drawn upon in tracing the development of this theme. In particular, I argue throughout that the oppositional quality of the novels and short stories identified by the liberal humanist critics is only truly evident in the early novels, such as A Room with a View. In the later novels, I argue, it is evident that Forster had significantly re-evaluated his understanding of the relationship between the dominant culture and its dissident, subordinate subcultural strands, and that he had begun to conceive of the interaction between the two in a vastly more fluid and pluralistic manner than has been acknowledged by earlier critics. In particular, Forster seems to apprehend in the later works the manner in which a subject can be simultaneously both at the centre and the margins of hislher respective cultural system. It is for this reason that I stress that Forster sees the relationship between mainstream and marginal cultures as an intersection rather than an opposition. I also stress throughout this thesis the fact that the mainstream/marginal theme extends beyond issues raised in the novels and short stories and includes the author himself. As a male homosexual living in a sexually repressive society, Forster was himself a marginalised member of society, and this cultural positioning must therefore be seen to infonn the themes raised in his writings. However, as a middle-class male, Forster was himself also an empowered subject, and his writing thus also reflects his own complicity in the power structures he was seeking to subvert. This is particularly evident when one considers the recurrent misogyny his novels and short stories display. In addition, Forster's particular historical positioning as an early twentieth century writer means that his novels resonate with several of the non-literary discourses so prominent in the period, such as feminism and sexology. It is when one considers the manner in which the novels actively engage with these non-literary discourses that the considerable political invective of Forster's writing becomes apparent. In the light of the issues outlined above, I interpret Forster's novels as an attempt on the author's part to vocalise the feelings, hopes and aspirations of those groups somehow marginalised from the dominant culture. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2002.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 234-242). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (MA)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2009. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael Sexson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 43-44).

Thesis--Umeå. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. "Works by E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf": p. 140-141. Errata slip inserted. Bibliography: p. 142-145.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1998. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 282-292).

British contemporary writer Zadie Smith is often representative of cosmopolitan writers of the twenty-first century: in both her fiction and nonfiction, she joins a multicultural background and broad, varied interests to an ethic based on the importance of interpersonal relationships and empathetic respect for the other. But while Smith is often considered the poster child for the contemporary British cosmopolitan, her ethics are in fact rooted in the one rather staid member of the canon: EM Forster, whose emphatic call to ‘only connect’ grounds all of Smith's fiction. Her latest novel, 2012's NW, further expands her relationship to Forster in highlighting both the promise and the limitations of empathy and cosmopolitan connection in the context of modern urban British life. This paper uses Kwame Anthony Appiah's definition of “rooted cosmopolitanism” to explore Forster's and Smith's shared ethics. I argue that their relationship grounds and influences Smith's literary rooted cosmopolitanism: that while she writes books for the age of globalization, her deliberate ties to the British canon suggest an investment in maintaining and reinvigorating the British novelistic tradition as a pathway to a collective British identity that is as expansive, modern, and empathetic as her novels.

No description available.

A study of the interrelationship of E.M. Fosters ideas as presented in his five novels, his two volumes of collected essays, and his treatise on the novel.

This dissertation traces imperialist ideology as it functions in the texts of two radical Liberal critics of imperialism, Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster. In chapters two and three respectively, I read Woolf's autobiographical account Growing and his novel The Village in the Jungle to examine connections between "nonfictional" and "fictional" writing on colonialism. The autobiography's fictive texture compromises its claims to facticity and throws into relief the problematic nature of notions of truth and fact in colonialist epistemology and discursive systems.