E.M. FORSTER AND ”THE MACHİNE STOPS”

Year 1988, Issue: 16, 17 - 31, 01.03.2024

Gülden Ertuğrul

Abstract

Edward Morgan Forster was born in Jan. I. 1879 in London and died in 1970. His great grand father had been a leading personage in the evangelical Clapham sect, which canıpaigned successfully for prison reform, abolition of the slave trade, and other Progressive social actions in the liberal direction. He vvas the child of a widowed mother and spent his childhood in a pleasant country house. He vvas isolated from the normal contacts of human life and like Somerset Maugham, he was miserable as a pupil at a conventional boy’s school. This experience vvas probably largely rcsponsible for his feeling of loneliness and neglect as it found a sensitive espression betvveen a mother and a son in his story ”The Machine Stops”. Hovvever when Forster went to Cambridge, he found there sympathetic environment, he took an honorary degree in classics and vvas deeply influenced by the leetures of George Edvvard Moore, the philosopher who vvrotc Principa Ethica. Forster joined the club of Apostles where he enjoyed freedom of debate and individual opinion. Forster was considered among the realists and he is said to mingle Hebraism with Helenism at the background of Victorian moral zeal, and to modify Philistinism by his classical interests at Cambridge.

Keywords

”THE MACHİNE STOPS”, E.M. FORSTER, EDEBİYAT

References

• Ailen, Walter The English Novel ,A Pelican Book, 1975. Forster, E.M. ”The Challenge of Our Time” Two Cheers for Democracy. (The Ebinger Edition, vol II, The chaucer Press, 1972).