Drawing on the notebooks, drafts and published version of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908), this article explores how the author intended to incorporate a homoerotic theme from the novel's genesis in 1901–2. While drafting it between 1902 and 1904, Forster struggled to represent a homoerotic theme grounded in Victorian Hellenism. His approach was revitalised by his engagement with Edward Carpenter's queer socialism, which re-energized Forster's Hellenic ideas. Carpenter's philosophy provided Forster with a framework which enabled him to complete his Italian novel and trace a same-sex relationship that transcended the Edwardian class divide.
All of bestselling American author Joseph Kanon's eleven novels to date are historical reconstructions harking back to World War II and its aftermath. Three of his espionage-centered narratives— The Prodigal Spy (1998), Defectors (2017), and The Accomplice (2019)—craft “historial” tales within the context of post-World War II historiography to suggest the radical contingency of historical outcomes in modernity. Kanon's success in this diegetic endeavor as a post-postmodernist writer, it has been claimed, makes him a worthy successor to such British precursors as Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré.
Using Mike Davis’ City of Quartz , Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead , and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower as an entry point, this article reconstructs the career of the concept of the Cold War, tracing the decline of its paradigm in favor of a shift to the more capacious category of imperialism.
In this article, I offer a close reading of Merleau-Ponty's Les Aventures de la dialectique (1955). This work of political philosophy, which culminates in a long chapter on Sartre that sealed the rupture between the two thinkers, also reflects on the politics of literature. While their quarrel has been widely discussed, the role of literature in this regard has received little attention. I will show how the notion of literary engagement, coined in 1945, was renegotiated during the Cold War through competing views of history. Adopting an intellectual-historical approach, I analyse how engagement is entwined with political conjunctures and philosophical positions.
