Concise explanations of some four thousand terms cover movements, trends, people, organizations, concepts, the natural and social sciences, the arts, history, and other disciplines
Oliver Stallybras Libri
Like his novel A Room with a View, E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread focuses on a group of English men and women living and traveling in Italy. A young Englishman journeys to Tuscany to rescue his late brother's wife from what appears to be an unsuitable romance with an Italian of little fortune. In the events surrounding that match and its fateful consequences, Forster weaves an exciting and eventful tale that intriguingly contrasts English and Italian lives and sensibilities. As in Forster novels, among them Howards End and A Passage to India, Where Angels Fear to Tread reveals the author's deep fascination with all of human experience — sexual, moral, spiritual, imaginative, material. Acutely observant of the ways of the English middle class, he is as critical here of its snobbishness, greed, and cultural insensitivity as he is respectful of its decency and kindness, common sense, and goodwill. This splendid novel reveals the great breadth of his gifts as both storyteller and humanist — attributes that continue to make him one of the twentieth century's most admired novelists.
From the literary icon, author of Howard's End and A Passage to India, comes a posthumous collection of short works, many never before published. Featuring fourteen short stories, The Life to Come spans six decades of E. M. Forster's literary career, tracking every phase of his development. Never having sought publication for most of the stories--only two were published in his lifetime--Forster worried his career would suffer because of their overtly homosexual themes. Instead they were shown to an appreciative circle of friends and fellow writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, and T. E. Lawrence. With stories that are lively and amusing ("What Does It Matter?"; "The Obelisk"), and others that are more somber and thought-provoking ("Dr Woolacott"; "Arthur Snatchfold"), The Life to Come sheds a light on Forster's powerful but suppressed explorations beyond the strictures of conventional society. "Have we been as ready for Forster's honesty as we thought we were? His greatness surely had root in his capacity to treat all human relationships seriously and truthfully. . . . Even the earliest and most ephemeral of them will be recognized as the frailer embodiments of the same passionate convictions that made for the moral iron of his novels." --Eudora Welty, The New York Times Book Review
ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL is a unique attempt to examine the novel afresh, rejecting the traditional methods of classification by chronology or subject- matter.
A Chandrapore, nell'India stretta sotto la morsa del colonialismo, si fronteggiano "Islam, un atteggiamento verso la vita squisito e durevole", la burocrazia britannica, "invadente e sgradevole come il sole" e "un pugno di fiacchi indù", in una silenziosa guerra fredda. Finché l'arrivo di una giovane turista inglese non viene a incrinare il fragile equilibrio. Perché Adela Quested, con stupore del clan dei sahib bianchi, non si accontenta dei circoli e delle visite ufficiali: vuole conoscere "la vera India" e trova la guida indigena perfetta nel mite e ospitale Aziz. Ma nelle grotte di Marabar la gita preparata con ogni cura si trasforma per Adela, vittima delle sue personali inquietudini o di un indegno affronto, in un dramma sconvolgente che arriva fino nelle aule di un tribunale, facendo esplodere pregiudizi, razzismi, contraddizioni. Lo scontro tra due civiltà agli antipodi per sentimenti e valori troverà anche la sua eroina inconsapevole: Esmiss Moor, Miss Moore per gli inglesi, figura simbolo di un'impossibile pacificazione. Il ritratto umano e poetico di un paese amatissimo si fa parabola della "segreta intelligenza del cuore" di contro alla protervia della ragione in quello che Forster chiamò "il mio romanzo indiano influenzato da Proust" e che è il suo indiscusso capolavoro.
