Missionary positions: reading the Bible in Forster's "The life to come".
E. M. Forster's short story "The Life to Come" intersects the concerns of both his colonial fiction (A Passage to India) and his homosexual fiction (Maurice). The confrontation in the story between a native chief and a missionary serves initially to explore the differences between permissive and prohibitional readings of the Bible, which reflects Forster's dislike of restrictive English morals. However, contextualizing the story within the project of translating Vedic scripture that attended British imperialism near the turn of the century demonstrates that Forster, like his contemporary and mentor Edward Carpenter, found within colonialism access to a mode of thinking that ultimately questioned the validity of either permission or prohibition as foundations for political argumentation.
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
Illustrations Abbreviations Preface 1: Introduction 2: Definitions 3: Rome: The Foundation 4: The Scriptures 5: Christians and Social Change 6: Theological Traditions 7: The Early Middle Ages 8: The Urban Revival 9: The Triumph of Ganymede: Gay Literature of the High Middle Ages 10: Social Change: Making Enemies 11: Intellectual Change: Men, Beasts, and "Nature" 12: Conclusions App. 1: Lexicography and Saint Paul App. 2: Texts and Translations Frequently Cited Works Index of Greek Terms General Index
The Edwardian Turn of Mind
The "Edwardian Turn of Mind" brilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors. His book is a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporary England was made.