Title: The Dawning and the Vanishing of Inspiration: A New Thematic Approach to Foster’s The Road from Colonus

Abstract: As the most famous short story by Edward Morgan Forster, The Road from Colonus has been much studied in relation to Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. This essay, by identifying Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” as another important source text, argues that this Foster’s is mainly about the dawning of inspiration as a testimony to the enormous power of the subconscious and the vanishing of inspiration due to the intervention of outsiders. An investigation into Forster’s personal circumstances reveals his strong trust in inspiration, as well as his deep-seated anxiety about its vanishing in the absence of someone committed to the idea of “only connect.”

Keywords: Edward Morgan Forster, The Road from Colonus, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” Inspiration

Author: Shenyou Mei, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, Beijing, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2021.04.001