https://repository.auw.edu.bd/handle/123456789/644 2026-05-15T09:24:15Z https://repository.auw.edu.bd/handle/123456789/608 Multitudes of Otherness: Italian and Indian Crowds in Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Passage to India x Pierini, Francesca Pierini This paper proposes a reflection on E.M. Forster’s literary construction of national otherness through a reading of two specific scenes, from his first and last published novels, that centre on the depiction of foreign crowds. From Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) to A Passage to India (1924), it is possible to detect a movement of growing awareness, within Forster’s consciousness, of the presence of the other. If the encounter with the Italian other is still highly mediated by an age-long literary tradition of fantasizing about the south of Europe that had depicted countries like Italy as unique constellations of counter-values to the British ethos, in A Passage to India the presence of the other is indeed more corporeal and revelatory of Forster’s acquired maturity in his ways of dealing with the responsibility of thinking and representing otherness. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://repository.auw.edu.bd/handle/123456789/590 “Such is the Working of the Southern Mind” A Postcolonial Reading of E.M. Forster’sItalian Narratives Pierini, Francesca; Pierini, Francesca This article discusses E.M. Forster’s “Italian narratives”, a literary corpus that reveals the complexity, the ambivalence, and the richness of Britain’s relation to the European South. Forster’s narratives present, through the interplay of their characters, a vast array of approaches and attitudes towards Italian culture. By making use of a long cultural and literary tradition that depicts Italy as the bearer of a unique constellation of counter-values perceived at the opposite spectrum of British ideals, Forster builds a series of narratives dominated by a game of revulsion and attraction towards the Italian Other, which is characterized by powerful and contradicting patterns. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://repository.auw.edu.bd/handle/123456789/589 Romance and Metagenre: A Response to Burkhard Niederhoff PIERINI, FRANCESCA This short essay constiutes a reflection on meta-generic strategies and practises employed by authors of romance fiction. Conceived as a response to Burkhard Niederhoff’s article published in Connotations, it aims at making literary criticism and romance fiction dialogue with one another by discussing several of the same texts analysed by Niederhoff from the perspective of Romance Studies. More specifically, this contribution to the debate on metagenre aims at making available some of the concepts developed by scholars of the romance novel to literary scholars. Adopting Pamela Regis’s definition of the happy ending as “betrothal,” the essay sketches a short progression of this trope as heading towards increasingly visible self-reflexive “metageneric” solutions. The outline begins with a discussion of E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) as a “failed romance” which aims at complementing Niederhoff’s reflections on the novel’s ending in connection to its protagonist’s inner development and maturation. It continues with an examination of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) which focuses on “the bitter notes” hidden within its apparently uncontentious happy ending, and it ends by analysing some of the explicit metageneric devices employed in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z https://repository.auw.edu.bd/handle/123456789/588 Discursive Intertextuality, Parody, and Mise en Abyme in A.S. Byatt’s Short Stories PIERINI, Francesca This essay analyses three short stories from A.S. Byatt's collection Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998) in light of several self-reflexive strategies. The short narratives Crocodile Tears and Baglady will be discussed from the perspective of "discursive intertextuality," a literary practice that foregrounds a discursive element established and detectable across genres. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary will be examined from the standpoint of intertextuality and mise en abyme. Once again, the study of this narrative will hinge on the discursive aspects of mise en abyme as a meta-generic approach put in place not to indefinitely reiterate "the same" concept, but to show the potentially endless possibilities of interpretation a text may offer its readers. Across these short stories, the opposition between fire and ice gets reworked in corresponding dichotomous sets: North vs. South, West vs. Orient, contemplative vs. active life. The specific goal this article sets itself to achieve is to show the contrasting trajectories at play in these short stories. Dense with contrasting and intersecting meta-generic paths, such narratives perform and make visible a double register of devotion/affection and questioning/deconstruction of genre norms in relation to established Anglophone discursive tropes. 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z