Bredbeck G W
Department of English-40, University of California, Riverside 92521-0323, USA.
J Homosex. 1997;33(3-4):139-61. doi: 10.1300/J082v33n03_07.
E. M. Forster's short story "The Life to Come" intersects the concerns of both his colonial fiction (A Passage to India) and his homosexual fiction (Maurice). The confrontation in the story between a native chief and a missionary serves initially to explore the differences between permissive and prohibitional readings of the Bible, which reflects Forster's dislike of restrictive English morals. However, contextualizing the story within the project of translating Vedic scripture that attended British imperialism near the turn of the century demonstrates that Forster, like his contemporary and mentor Edward Carpenter, found within colonialism access to a mode of thinking that ultimately questioned the validity of either permission or prohibition as foundations for political argumentation.
E.M.福斯特的短篇小说《来世》既涉及了他的殖民主义小说（《印度之行》）的关注点，也涉及了他的同性恋小说（《莫里斯》）的关注点。故事中一位土著酋长与一位传教士之间的对峙，最初是为了探讨对《圣经》宽容解读与禁止解读之间的差异，这反映了福斯特对英国严苛道德规范的厌恶。然而，将这个故事置于世纪之交伴随英国帝国主义而来的吠陀经文翻译项目的背景下可以看出，福斯特和他同时代的导师爱德华·卡彭特一样，在殖民主义中找到了一种思维方式，这种思维方式最终对将宽容或禁止作为政治论证基础的有效性提出了质疑。
