Concerning E.M. Forster
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Publisher Description
A major reassessment of the one of the greatest English novelist of the twentieth century, from celebrated critic Sir Frank Kermode.
CONCERNING E.M. FORSTER is a rich, varied and original portrait of a literary great. When Sir Frank Kermode delivered the Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, he chose E.M. Forster as his subject; these lectures form the core of this book. Kermode reappraises the influence and meaning of Forster's oeuvre, offering a fascinating interpretation of his most celebrated work, A PASSAGE TO INDIA.
There follows a series of interweaving discussions that bring to life diverse topics - Empire, class, poverty, the condition of the novel, the role of the artist - but always return to our enigmatic subject. Kermode also reflects on Forster's considerable talent and shortcomings, places him within a wider social context, and casts spotlight on his contemporaries, presenting a unique panorama of twentieth-century English literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Noted literary critic Kermode (Shakespeare's Language) presents in part his 2007 Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, given eight decades after Forster's own Clark lectures (published as Aspects of the Novel) and in part a "causerie" ("a loosely organized sequence of observations"), in which "Forster is reduced in size, placed in a wider context, and occasionally scolded." Kermode provides erudite and good-humored insights into Forster's artistic philosophies, plus deft analyses of the techniques of Forster's contemporaries, such as Henry James (whose style Forster disliked), Virginia Wolfe, Ford Madox Ford and Forster favorite Marcel Proust. Enlarging on Benjamin Britten's remark that Forster was "our most musical novelist," Kermode shows how musical "transformation and return of phrases was an art he practiced with success in his novels." Kermode makes the case that Forster's homosexuality was the reason for "his long abstention from fiction" and establishes that Forster placed himself in a "cultivated minority" above the working classes. Kermode is a delightful mentor for readers wishing to reflect not only on Forster's "creativity but on the personal and social circumstances that restricted it."
