A Nightingale Between Two Worlds of Dust": Art and Imagination in E. M. Forster's Italian Novels

Abstract

<p>E. M. Forster's critical conception of art as "the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced" and his notion of the imagination as a redeeming power find expression in his "Italian" novels where he includes within these fictions aesthetic objects and aesthetic analogues which draw attention to the nature of artistic representation (including Forster's own), and which also thematize his concern with the function of the imagination in relation to external reality. An account of his aesthetics, particularly as they relate to the function of the artistic imagination in relation to external reality, is offered in the Introduction. This account of Forster's ideas about the nature of art and artists constitutes a framework of preoccupations in light of which the Italian novels are discussed in the succeeding two chapters. Both Chapters I and II discuss the implications of the oppositions which develop in the novels between art and life, the imagined and the real, aestheticism and naturalness, detachment and involvement, but more importantly, they discuss these conflicts in light of the tension, apparent in Forster's own critical views, between his endorsement of involvement in personal relations on the one hand and his valuation of art and the imagination (and consequent endorsement of a withdrawal from life) on the other. In the novels. art both opposes and inspires life, and although the search for a reconciliation of the claims of art and life is their motive power. their burden is the demonstration of uninspiring discord and complexity in existence and a related undertone of sympathy for withdrawal into the unified world of art.</p>