Conservative and Transformative Hospitality in the Works of E. M. Forster and Joseph Conrad

This study explores fictional representations of hospitality in the novels and short stories of two notable early 20th-century authors, E. M. Forster and Joseph Conrad. The thesis investigates these authors’ engagement with the theme of hospitality as a foundational literary topos in Western literature, and it analyses how ethical issues posed by the hospitality relation operate within fictional texts at the level of theme, mode, setting, ideology, and narrative technique. The research begins by presenting the philosophical background of hospitality studies and the relevance of the topic to contemporary literary criticism. The study’s specific focus on the works of Forster and Conrad is then justified by establishing their place in the Edwardian literary landscape, and their relevance to the critical perspectives that the author employs in his analysis of the texts. In particular, the hospitality relation is discussed in light of the dialectic between domestic and non-domestic spaces, as well as of the opposition between the realist and the romantic mode. The recurrent textual dramatisation of the host/guest relationship as a form of liberation allows the author to posit a dichotomy between ‘conservative’ and ‘transformative’ instances of hospitality in fiction. Following a theoretical introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 discusses Forster’s Howards End (1910) as a novel that stages hospitality in the domestic domain, which is shown to encompass both house and nation. Chapter 3 explores Forster’s representations of ‘other’, foreign spaces in two short stories and in his debut novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Chapter 4 goes on to discuss hospitality in the colonial context, by reading Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) as a novel that associates hospitality across the colonial divide with romantic transcendence. Chapter 5 inaugurates the section devoted to the works of Joseph Conrad, which begins by considering two of his fictions that set on land, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and “Amy Foster” (1901). Chapter 6 goes on to discuss Conrad’s maritime fiction with “The Secret Sharer” (1909) and The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), two texts that stage the conflicting ethical claims of hospitality and of professional duty in the British Merchant Navy.