“Distinguishing t'Other from Which”

In roughly contemporary terms, E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Andrew Fraser’s Rajahs and Ryots (1911) put Edwardian stress upon the “condition of England” debate (famously described by Carlyle in 1839 “the alpha and omega of all” [168]), as a particularly domestic set of issues. Recent scholarship has correctly suggested that this cultural “condition” was not merely an export to the colonies but comprised of discursive circuits of Britishness established “by going elsewhere” (Gikandi 51), by travelling along the routes of the imperial nexus. This colonial “elsewhere” likewise exerts influence upon debates about the transculturation of Edwardian liberalism that embraced the farthest reaches of the globe. Pro- and anti-imperial liberal, respectively, Fraser and Forster negotiated competing liberal responses to industrialization, modernity, capitalism, and the role of women in politics. Fraser’s work, in particular, presents a contradictory liberal complex that at once criticizes metropolitan decadence and degeneration (after Kipling) and endorses metropolitan values of “civilization” and “progress.” ¹ Though imperial, Fraser’s text may be readily established as a “condition of England” life writing or auto/biography ² , and Forster’s a “condition of empire” novel; both texts redefine “domestic” as well as “imperial” polarities within Edwardian literature.