E. M. Forster in the Streets

Abstract

This chapter explores the representational crisis posed by the First World War. I begin by examining the print artefacts that helped new arrivals in Egypt navigate and interpret this unfamiliar setting, including colonial newspapers, dictionaries and travel guides. Because of their layout and practical use, these documents drew attention to their status as print artefacts. A concern with the materiality of language and print also developed into a preoccupation within these pages. In the Egyptian Mail and Alexandria: A History and a Guide, E. M. Forster staged encounters with shop signs and monument inscriptions as a way of grappling with the war’s linguistic crisis. Ranging from spelling mistakes enlarged on English shop signs in Cairo to the indecipherable scripts on the ancient monuments of Alexandria, words on public display brought the material and visual qualities of language, rather than its referentiality, newly into view. For Forster, these objects of writing – censored papers, shop signs, monument plaques – were at the heart of his response to the conflict, developing into concretely tangible records of the war’s epistemological crisis.