Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The phrase “make it new” originates from the title of a book of essays published by Pound with Faber (1934) and Yale University Press (1935). This phrase has become closely associated with Pound, but more generally with the Modernist movement as defined by Pound. In Pound's poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” the title character, “out of key with his time,” counts his attempt to “resuscitate the dead art/of poetry” among his failed or now-meaningless poetic endeavors (l. 1–2). For a range of references to the language-centeredness of Modernism, see Schwab on language and subjectivity (ix, 2), Kaufmann on the “bodies” of texts (17, 14), McGann on experimentation with language and the small presses (179), Josipovici on reading as a focus of Modernist texts (xvi), and Schwartz on the Modernist “crisis of literacy” and the rise of middle-class readership (15). See Graff, The Literacy Myth and Legacies of Literacy. For a useful explanation of literacy theory that divides theorists between those who see literacy as “causal” (theorists Goody, Havelock, McLuhan, Olson, Ong, and Stock) or as a “facilitating agent” (theorists Eisenstein, Scribner, Cole, Finnegan, and Street), see F. Niyi Akinnaso (139). Virginia Woolf may be seen as distancing herself from this debate in The Common Reader. See for example, Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism. See Ong, Orality and Literacy p. 103–8. See for example Heath, “Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions.” D. H. Lawrence addresses the danger literacy poses to the vital energy of the individual in his Fantasia of the Unconscious. See Cavallo and Chartier p. 295–301, for discussion of the “‘sentimental’ or ‘empathetic’ form of reading” that emerged from Enlightenment educational philosophy at the end of the Eighteenth century, a mode of reading “specifically associated with the names Richardson, Rousseau, Klopstock, and Goethe,” misapplication of which resulted in the “wave of suicides” among early readers of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (295–97). Her name carries further “natural” associations, a link to John Evelyn, “whose Sylva was written about those woods around Abinger that Forster would later celebrate in his Abinger Pageant” (Herz 33). While Declan Kiberd's landmark postcolonial study Inventing Ireland only mentions Forster in reference to A Passage to India, the study nevertheless addresses numerous topics that would illuminate a more detailed postcolonial reading of Miss Beaumont's character or Forster's story in general. See, for example, Kiberd's discussion of native Irish poets' use of natural and mythic imagery (in particular, “woods”) to represent nationalism and resistance (16–17), the English perception of the Irish as child-like and feminine (30, 104), Irish reclamation and reinterpretation of a stereotyped colonial identity (“for superstitious use religious, for backward say traditional, for irrational suggest emotional”) (32), Yeats's and Shaw's connections between nature and place (107), or Kiberd's treatment of postcolonial use of the magical realist mode (60, 338–39), arguably a strategy used by Forster in “Other Kingdom.” Dressing Miss Beaumont in green further contributes to the postcolonial subtext of the story, while replacing the “Irish” green with brown suggests that the influence of English colonialism dulls and ages its object. Associating brown with the British Empire may further suggest that the Empire itself is in decline—brown being more closely associated with fall or even winter than the spring or summer-like green. Compare Browning's reference to the artistic vision of Michelangelo, Raphael, and da Vinci in “Andrea del Sarto”: “Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,/Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,/Enter and take their place there, sure enough,/Though they come back and cannot tellthe world” (l. 83–86). Forster's stories contain characters who reach transcendence through reading (the boy, Miss Beaumont), who are unable to tell the world, alongside those for whom the literary heaven is shut, who are, like Browning's del Sarto, bound to material and social reality. Inskip's observation aboutFord positions him uniquely in this construct—he is transported “not to heaven, but to another earth” (52). Additional informationNotes on contributorsNicole duPlessisNicole duPlessis received her Ph.D. in 2008. She lives with her family in College Station, TX, where she is currently employed by the Department of English at Texas A&M.
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Jan 3, 2024
Xiaomin Wang 
Open Access
