Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Herbert N. Schneidau

Critical Essay by Herbert N. Schneidau

SOURCE: Schneidau, Herbert N. “Safe as Houses: Forster as Cambridge Anthropologist.” In Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism, pp. 64-102. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Schneidau explores the ways in which Howards End evidences “autochthony,” or “an ideology of sacred space,” as symbolized by the house Howards End.

Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?

—Ruth Wilcox

Many agree with Lionel Trilling that Howards End is “undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece.”¹ A Passage to India, written much later, may have reached a wider audience, partly because of the topicality of its antiracist and anticolonialist sentiments, and of course Forster enthusiasts can make cases even for the earlier works. But for those interested in the twentieth-century novel, this creation of “1908-1910” counts as a high-water mark for Forster and the genre. The British novel...
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