Although there was, as we shall see, a literary tradition of hybrid texts (epitomized by Kipling’s Kim, for instance) that Forster might have chosen to abide by, there are a limited number of Indian words in a novel that denies the kind of textual passage the title might herald. But this metonymic word-dropping differs from the experience of India in A Passage to India. The writer, here, retains the guilty pleasure of a tourist dabbling with the music of elsewhere. Beyond the occasional allusion to Renaissance culture, such as Dante or Leonardo Da Vinci, Italian signifiers function as the melodious echoes of a land which breeds beauty and freedom, the very opposite of cold normative England. Modeled on San Gimignano with its myriad of towers, Forster’s Monteriano is first described by an entry in the Baedeker, a pastiche which duly includes an Italian motto: ‘Poggibonizzi, fatti in là, che Monteriano si fa città!’ (Forster 1976, 37). Forster plays on the contrast between Italy and England. 1 In his early novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View, E. M.
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