A “condition of England” Novel: A New Historicist Reading of Howards End
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This paper takes Brian May’s argument as a given—that Margaret is a liberal ironist who keeps redefining situations as things happen understanding the “contingency” of liberal language and moves towards more peaceful and constructive way of living together with others. What this paper attempts to do is to give a new historicist interpretation of the novel as a whole to give a more concrete and fuller explication of the novel as an Edwardian cultural product. It examines the way the contemporary British culture is captured or created in the novelistic text, and how the two illusive entities, the British culture and the fictional text, are interacting with each other. It particularly notices the presence in the novel of multitudinous aspects of Edwardian cultural dichotomy and sees in them the fundamental pattern of the modern versus the traditional. The final argument is that the novel looks to the British traditional agrarian life as an ideal prototype for the kind of egalitarian, communal and even androgynous human society Forster seems to have wanted to establish in England on behalf of not only the Edwardian liberals and feminists but also himself with his own personal longing for the inner life. This vision of uniquely Forsterian community is suggested at the end of the novel and the novel’s famous epigraph or motif of connection is perceived as what provides the philosophical base that breeds Forsterian community spirit and makes such community possible even if, for the time being at least, only in an art form.
Abstract
This paper takes Brian May’s argument as a given—that Margaret is a liberal ironist who keeps redefining situations as things happen understanding the “contingency” of liberal language and moves towards more peaceful and constructive way of living together with others. What this paper attempts to do is to give a new historicist interpretation of the novel as a whole to give a more concrete and fuller explication of the novel as an Edwardian cultural product. It examines the way the contemporary British culture is captured or created in the novelistic text, and how the two illusive entities, the British culture and the fictional text, are interacting with each other. It particularly notices the presence in the novel of multitudinous aspects of Edwardian cultural dichotomy and sees in them the fundamental pattern of the modern versus the traditional. The final argument is that the novel looks to the British traditional agrarian life as an ideal prototype for the kind of egalitarian, communal and even androgynous human society Forster seems to have wanted to establish in England on behalf of not only the Edwardian liberals and feminists but also himself with his own personal longing for the inner life. This vision of uniquely Forsterian community is suggested at the end of the novel and the novel’s famous epigraph or motif of connection is perceived as what provides the philosophical base that breeds Forsterian community spirit and makes such community possible even if, for the time being at least, only in an art form.
참고문헌 (18)
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