The Narrator in the Closet: The Ambiguous Narrative Voice in Howards End

Armstrong, Paul B.

doi:10.1353/mfs.2001.0013

Cited by 6 publications

References 12 publications

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Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy

Wolfe

2011

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Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy integrates studies of six members and associates of the Bloomsbury group into a rich narrative of early twentieth century culture, encompassing changes in the demographics of private and public life, and Freudian and sexological assaults on middle-class proprieties Jesse Wolfe shows how numerous modernist writers felt torn between the inherited institutions of monogamy and marriage and emerging theories of sexuality which challenged Victorian notions of maleness and femaleness. For Wolfe, this ambivalence was a primary source of the Bloomsbury writers' aesthetic strength: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and others brought the paradoxes of modern intimacy to thrilling life on the page. By combining literary criticism with forays into philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and the avant-garde art of Vienna, this book offers a fresh account of the reciprocal relations between culture and society in that key site for literary modernism known as Bloomsbury.

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Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy

Wolfe

2011

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The Economy of Recognition in Howards End

Shirkhani¹

2008

Twentieth-Century Literature

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Social Non-Conformists in Forster’s Italy: Otherness and the Enlightened English Tourist

Roszak¹

2014

ari

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Recent years have seen increasing attention to E. M. Forster’s approach to issues of race and ethnicity, including how Forster’s oeuvre advances problematic views of foreign cultures. Nevertheless, the criticism on Forster’s Italian novels has lagged behind, with readers continuing to emphasize how Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908) valorize Italian culture and undermine prejudiced assumptions of English cultural superiority. This article considers the portrayal of English social non-conformists in Forster’s Italy, individuals whose interactions with Italian people and landscapes inspire them to develop new ways of approaching class and gender as well as nation and ethnicity. I reveal that while the Italian novels use this trope of the non-conformist to stress a foreign culture’s power to generate reform at home, they also overemphasize the cultural difference that separates Italy from England, indulging in primitivist, patronizing depictions of Italian spaces and people. The novels also exhibit a problematic narrative impulse to sacrifice their Italian characters for the benefit of their Englishmen and Englishwomen, imagining the lives and especially the deaths of Italians as a tool for enlightening the English tourist. This discontinuity in Forster exemplifies the persistent essentialization of Italy in twentieth-century Anglo-American fiction.

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The Narrator in the Closet: The Ambiguous Narrative Voice in Howards End

Cited by 6 publications

References 12 publications

Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy

Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy

The Economy of Recognition in Howards End

Social Non-Conformists in Forster’s Italy: Otherness and the Enlightened English Tourist

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