Forster, Edward Morgan. (1879 - 1970).
W o r k
- wrote six novels, several collections of short stories, and critical, descriptive, and autobiographical prose
- associated with the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ x but: the least experimental of his Modernist comporaries
< influenced by the Greek mythology and Italian Renaissance art: seeks the ‘spontaneity of consciousness’ in personal relationships amid the complexities and distortions of modern life
> contrasts the Greek and Italian peasant life x the stuffy and repressed life of the English
- concerned with personal relationships in the Edwardian middle-class
- takes an independent liberal view, criticizes the abuses of the world
- intermixed a sharp, observant, and sometimes bitter social comedy x a didactic insistence on the virtues of tolerance and human decency
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905):
- concerned with the tragicomic conflicts between the refined English gentility x the coarse Italian vitality
The Longest Journey (1907):
- examines the differences between the living x dead relationships
- includes an incidental satire of English public school education
A Room with a View (1908):
- concerned with the nature of love
- contrasts the smugness, comfortable pretentiousness, and emotional repression of English visitors to Florence x the Italian freedom of spirit
Howards End (1910):
- concerned with the relation between inward feeling x outward action
- forms and unforms a series of connections between the antipathetic cultures of business and the intellect
A Passage to India (1924):
- concerned with the relations of the British x the Indians in the Raj
- set ‘out of time’ and deliberately free from specific political reference
- presents the British as an élite isolated by its sense of superiority and by sticking to the petty snobberies of ‘home’
- originally meant ‘as a little bridge btw East and West’ x but: his ‘sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable’
- concludes that the British and the Indians cannot be friends as yet
Maurice (1971, posthumously):
- defines and justifies a homosexual love
- a brave attempt to question taboos x but: as a work of art not successful
Aspects of the Novel (1927):
- a minor classic of criticism, concerned with the techniques of fiction
Basics
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Edward Morgan Forster. (1879 - 1970). British. -
Work
Novelist. Short story writer. Literary critic. Author of A Passage to India (1924). -
Genre
Modern fiction. Colonialism. Humanism.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Quote
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
From Howards End (1910).