Antony Copley: A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writing of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood. xi, 397 pp. Lanham MD and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006. $30.95. ISBN 978 0 7391 1465 0.

2008 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-128
Author(s):  
William Radice
Keyword(s):  
Christopher Isherwood ◽  
Edward Carpenter

Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice'

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
First Century ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Christopher Isherwood ◽  
James Ivory ◽  
Edward Carpenter

This is the first book-length study of Forster’s posthumously published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives in literature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Begun in 1913 and revised over almost 50 years, Maurice became a defining text in Forster’s work and a canonical example of queer fiction. Yet the critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a ‘revelation’ of Forster’s homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aesthetic contexts for this novel. This collection places Maurice among early twentieth-century debates about politics, philosophy, religion, gender, Aestheticism and allegory. Essays explore how the novel interacts with literary predecessors and contemporaries including John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, and how it was shaped by personal relationships such as Forster’s friendship with Florence Barger. They close-read the textual variants of Forster’s manuscripts and examine the novel’s genesis and revisions. They consider the volatility of its reception, analysing how it galvanizes subsequent generations of writers and artists including Christopher Isherwood, Alan Hollinghurst, Damon Galgut, James Ivory, and twenty-first-century online fanfiction writers. What emerges from the volume is the complexity of the novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon.

Modernism, Space and the City

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Blaise Cendrars ◽  
Stephen Spender ◽  
Christopher Isherwood ◽  
The City

This innovative book examines the development of modernism in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Focusing upon how literary and cultural outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect, mood, and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. It considers three broad features of urban modernism: the built environment of the particular cities, such as cafés or transport systems; the cultural institutions of publishing that underpinned the development of modernism in these locations; and the complex perceptions of writers and artists who were outsiders to the four cities. Particular attention is thus given to the transnational qualities of modernism by examining figures whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles, or strangers. The writers and artists discussed include Mulk Raj Anand, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selon, and Stephen Spender.

Images and Reflections of the Spiritual Self in Christopher Isherwood’s Narratives

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322
Author(s):  
Mario Faraone
Keyword(s):  
Conversion Period ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
Spiritual Self ◽  
Christopher Isherwood ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

Throughout his life, Christopher Isherwood explored his sense of himself through a range of different genres of writing: autobiography, letters and journals, and fiction. The polysemic image of the mirror plays a major role in the structuring of his novels and other writings. Through the figure of the mirror, the writer signals many nearly imperceptible yet significant changes over time. This article explores this image in a range of Isherwood’s writings, and argues that, through its deployment, the artist very often questions himself about the dichotomy between appearance and reality. The presence of the mirror in the early writings assumes modalities which are distinct from those belonging to the conversion period to Vedanta, the Hindu-oriented philosophy and religion.

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