Concerning E. M. Forster - Softcover

Kermode, Frank

3.69

39 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374532389 ISBN 13: 9780374532383

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

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A major reassessment of the great English novelist

This impressive new book by the celebrated British critic Frank Kermode examines hitherto neglected aspects of the novelist E. M. Forster's life and work. Kermode is interested to see how it was that this apparently shy, reclusive man should have claimed and kept such a central position in the English writing of his time, even though for decades he composed no fiction and he was not close to any of his great contemporaries―Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce.

Concerning E. M. Forster has at its core the Clark Lectures that Kermode gave at Cambridge University in 2007 on the subject of Forster, eighty years after Forster himself gave those lectures, which became Aspects of the Novel. Kermode reappraised the influence and meaning of that great work, assessed the significance of Forster's profound musicality (Britten thought him the most musical of all writers), and offered a brilliant interpretation of Forster's greatest work, A Passage to India. But there is more to Concerning E. M. Forster than that. Thinking about Forster vis-�vis other great modern writers, noting his interest in Proust and Gide and his lack of curiosity about American fiction, and observing that Forster was closest to the people who shared not his literary interests or artistic vocation but, rather, his homosexuality, Kermode's book offers a wise, original, and persuasive new portrait not just of Forster but of twentieth-century English letters.

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About the Author:

Frank Kermode (1919-2010) is the author of many books, including Shakespeare's Language (FSG, 2000), Not Entitled (FSG, 1995), Forms of Attention, and The Sense of an Ending. He taught extensively in the United States, and lived in Cambridge, England.

From 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. (Dec.)
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