E.M. Forster Research Papers

Forster's style with reference to his novels.

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- by Umama Shah
- •
- 11
  English Literature, Literature, The Novel, Stylistics

Although E.M. Forster’s concern with the imaginative and emotional aspects of place is well-known, the specifics of what he meant by place and the way it changed throughout his seventy-year writing career are not. This study proposes a... more

Although E.M. Forster’s concern with the imaginative and emotional aspects of place is well-known, the specifics of what he meant by place and the way it changed throughout his seventy-year writing career are not. This study proposes a ‘deep locational criticism’ derived by combining the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre with empirical topographic and historical approaches to the particular English zones with which Forster was most familiar. These zones are conceptualized with a multiple London at the centre, then the Home Counties and a notion of Wild England as concentric circles beyond.

The introductory chapter is a survey of approaches to space and place produced in different disciplines, including philosophy, narratology, literary criticism, human geography and sociolinguistics, which proposes a tripartite model of literary place: physical encounters (incorporating a personal dimension in an academic study of literary place), loco-reference and intra-textual landscapes. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular English place and traces its presence and alterations throughout Forster’s writings. Six places of radically varying sizes are covered in this way: Sawston (an imaginative construct based on Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells in Kent); ‘Wild England’; Surrey; London; King’s College, Cambridge; Rooksnest, Stevenage, Hertfordshire.

Among Forster’s works his fiction, notably the novels The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End and Maurice and certain short stories, is present, but equal weight is given to his non-fiction, for example his diaries and journals, various essays, his Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography, and “West Hackhurst: A Surrey Ramble”, his little-known but highly revealing account of his life in Surrey and family connections there. Forster’s views of English place were always in flux and examination of their details calls into question many aspects of the familiar and accepted account of him. It also suggests new directions for future studies of the so-called age of Modernism and indeed for literary studies more generally. Starting from the details and narratives of specific places writers inhabit and describe, a spatial or topographic sub-field of literary study could grow towards the level of sophistication and maturity long ago attained by literary historical study.

"Cybercultural Ecologies examines the interpenetrating relationships between nature, virtuality, and narrative. Operating at the interface between ecocriticism and cyberculture, its approach is narrative-based and thematic, focusing on... more

"Cybercultural Ecologies examines the interpenetrating relationships between nature, virtuality, and narrative. Operating at the interface between ecocriticism and cyberculture, its approach is narrative-based and thematic, focusing on texts (literary, cinematic, and new media) which depict varying conceptions of technology, virtuality, and their effects. Understanding these effects is ecologically crucial, because technovirtual interfaces profoundly alter one’s experience of nature, corporeality, and relationships. Even the most basic sense of what counts as an environment in the first place depends on the interfaces one uses.

The Introduction examines the ambiguities surrounding the terms of its own investigation: cyberculture, ecology, interface, nature, virtuality. Drawing from Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, it responds to the “interface anxiety” evinced by environmental writers and ecocritics by arguing that nostalgia for an “authentic,” supplement-free mode of “contact” is itself a pastoral fiction.

Chapter I examines virtuality’s relationship with nature in both virtual reality and mixed reality paradigms, beginning with nineteenth-century decadence and aestheticism — Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) and Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890)—before moving to Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), and Vinge’s Synthetic Serendipity (2004).

Chapter II questions the attempt to evade virtuality and machinery in order to reclaim “unmediated contact” through the “natural” body in Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

Chapter III looks at the liberation offered by the virtual body, as well as its liabilities, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).

Chapter IV scrutinizes the authenticity of virtual relationships in Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel (1940) and Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005).

Chapter V inquires into how a virtual sense of place is evoked in Dickens’ mid-nineteenth century railway sketches and in 21st-century digital interactive narratives.

The Conclusion examines the film Avatar (2009) and explores the possibilities (and problems) that arise in attempting to make audiences “see” with ecological vision through the lenses of virtuality."

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- by Alf Seegert
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- 48
  Religion, New Media, Technoculture, Ethnography

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- by Simon During
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- 12
  Cultural Studies, Political Theory, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory

Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. M. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context. Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates... more

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- by Allen Mendenhall
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- 10
  British Literature, Hinduism, Law, Jurisprudence

E. M. Forster’s interest in emotions as well as in various ways of expressing and suppressing them was expressed in a variety ways. His essays on the matter such as “Notes on the English Character” in which he presents the idea of “the... more

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- by Krzysztof Fordonski
- •
- 8
  English Novel, Edward Morgan Forster, Emotions, E.M. Forster

"The volume intended to commemorate the 40th anniversary of E. M. Forster's death. It consists of ten papers by various authors which deal with various aspects of Forster's oeuvre, creating a new overview of his works from his novels,... more

The present paper aims at a presentation of the issue of religion in 'Maurice' – both in the text of the novel and in its readings. The text below is the original version presented at the conference dedicated to 'Maurice:, the final... more

Almost all readings of E.M. Forster’s Howards End note the famous epigraph – “Only connect…” – but it is not at all obvious how we are supposed to understand it. Connect what, exactly? Here, I propose a new interpretation: that to connect... more

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- by Mark Hopwood
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- 4
  Ethics, Philosophy and Literature, Moral Hypocrisy, E.M. Forster

This is a short piece of literary criticism on the use of 'narrative absence' to discuss trauma and consciousness in the work of Virginia Woolf. Although a brief summary is given, familiarity with Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse... more

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- by Jennifer Amell
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- 15
  British Literature, English Literature, Literature, Literary Criticism

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India presents Brahman Hindu jurisprudence as an alternative to British rule of law, a utilitarian jurisprudence that hinges on mercantilism, central planning, and imperialism. Building on John Hasnas’s... more

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- by Allen Mendenhall
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- 13
  Law, Jurisprudence, English Literature, Literature

The article offers a detailed examination of the way the screenplay writer and director of the movie 'A Room with a View" dealt with the symbolic patterns present in the original novel by E. M. Forster.

Howards End presents a world in flux and mobility in the advent of modernism where art and literature are tested for their ability to save the individual in the context of a quest for an English house, Howards End, which on a symbolic... more

Book of abstracts for the conference E.M. Forster: Nature, Culture, Queer! held in Ludwigsburg in April 2018.

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- by Krzysztof Fordonski and +1
  Heiko Zimmermann
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- 7
  English Literature, English Novel, Edward Morgan Forster, Edwardian Literature

Literary reasons for why J.R.R. Tolkien might have co-nominated (alongside Lord David Cecil and F. P. Wilson) the British author E. M. Forster for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Also, a discussion about whether the triple nomination for... more

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- by Dennis Wilson Wise
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- 9
  J. R. R. Tolkien, Edward Morgan Forster, C.S. Lewis, E.M. Forster

This study presents the formative period of the English novelist E. M. Forster (1879-1970) with a special stress on the usage of symbolism in his early fiction. The book offers a new approach to Forster's symbolism derived from the... more

After writing "The Literary Modernist Assault on Philosophy," I decided to focus on Virginia Woolf's critique of philosophy. At first, Woolf, like most Bloomsbury writers, was both moved and influenced by the philosophy of G.E. Moore.... more

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- by Michael Lackey
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- 28
  Intellectual History, Psychology, Philosophy, Political Philosophy

Critics of E.M. Forster have often commented on the conflict between stagnated intellectualism and a mystified nature in his work. They have traced that conflict to cultural influences, or simply described it metaphorically. In contrast,... more

When teaching a course on modernism, I noticed that many prominent writers (Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster) made some unkind remarks about philosophers and philosophy. What prompted this... more

“If I Had to Choose” – E. M. Forster and the Idea of Friendship” in: Kusek, Robert and Ewa Kowal (eds.), Politics and Poetics of Friendship, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2017, pp. 113-126. E. M. Forster famously... more

Special Issue of the PJES dedicated to E.M. Forster

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- by Krzysztof Fordonski and +2
  Heiko Zimmermann
  Anna Kwiatkowska
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- 10
  English Literature, Translation Studies, Opera, Edward Morgan Forster

The article retraces the locations of E. M. Forster's novels (Italy, England, India) and seeks to establish their role in the context of conventional geography of homosexual desire at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century. Published... more

The article concentrates on two small and little known dramatic texts (pageants) written by E. M. Forster in the late 1930s entitled The Abinger Pageant and England’s Pleasant Land. The introductory part introduces the history of pageant... more

Book of Abstracts of the E.M. Forster Conference to be held in Olsztyn 29-30th September 2016 - more details available here http://society.emforster.de/olsztyn-2016

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- by Krzysztof Fordonski and +1
  Heiko Zimmermann
- •
- 7
  English Literature, English Novel, Edward Morgan Forster, E.M. Forster

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- by Karel Van Ooteghem
- •
- E.M. Forster

It is a part of the conventional knowledge that E.M. Forster continuously refused to authorise movie adaptations of his novels. Consequently, the first feature film made of his novel, David Lean’s A Passage to India, was produced only in... more

It is a part of the conventional knowledge that E.M. Forster continuously refused to authorise movie adaptations of his novels. Consequently, the first feature film made of his novel, David Lean’s A Passage to India, was produced only in 1984. Lean’s movie was, however, not only the eighth movie adaptation of a Forster’s work, it was also the second movie the screenplay of which was based on the play written by Santha Rama Rau in 1960. The seven movies, five of which were broadcast in Forster’s lifetime, were produced and broadcasted between 1958 and 1977 by the two British TV stations: the ITV and the BBC.
The movie adaptations were only a part of Forster’s presence “on the air”. The writer’s involvement with the BBC is generally known, two selections of his radio talks were published in 2008. The collaboration, however, greatly exceeded the talks as the BBC broadcasted also Forster’s literary works, initially mostly short stories but later on also excerpts from the novels which were read either by the author himself or by actors. Forster read the first (unspecified in the available listings) short story on May 7th, 1927. The collaboration moved to a new stage in 1942 when the first radio play, The Celestial Omnibus, adapted by Leonard Cottrell (1913-1974) was broadcasted on September 1st. Cottrell went to prepare two more plays after he returned from the Mediterranean where he was a war correspondent. The task was taken over by Lance Sieveking (1896-1972) who adapted Forster’s novels as multi-episode radio-plays (e.g. Howards End in 13 episodes in 1964). Ten such radio-plays were broadcasted in Forster’s lifetime. Forster did not object to having his work adapted for the stage either. The first play adapted from his novel, Stephen Tait’s and Kenneth Allot’s A Room with a View, was produced and then published in 1951; three more such plays were written and performed by 1970. For the sake of brevity, however, the paper concentrates on their appearances on the radio and TV.
The paper will attempt to show how radio and TV adaptations kept Forster’s popularity as a writer alive in a period when he longer wrote fiction, paving the way for the Academy Awards winning movies in the 1980s and 1990s. It will be based on the available material (sadly, most of the early TV films are apparently lost), criticism, as well as Forster’s own comments on the cinema and adaptations.

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- by Krzysztof Fordonski
- •
- 14
  Radio, Edward Morgan Forster, TV studies, TV drama

"The article discusses the influence of mass tourism, especially originating from Great Britain, upon Italy at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century as presented in the early fiction of Edward Morgan Forster, especially the short... more

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- by Krzysztof Fordonski
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- 19
  Geography, Development Studies, Ecotourism, Heritage Tourism

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- by Doruk Özcan
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- 8
  English Literature, Film Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Film Analysis

Special issue of the LLSW dedicated to the 50th anniversary of E. M. Forster's death. Adaptation, Inspiration, Dialogue: E.M. Forster and His Oeuvre in Contemporary Culture Krzysztof Fordoński . 11 Biography E.M. Forster in Africa Evelyne... more

Special issue of the LLSW dedicated to the 50th anniversary of E. M. Forster's death.
Adaptation, Inspiration, Dialogue: E.M. Forster and His Oeuvre in Contemporary Culture
Krzysztof Fordoński . 11
Biography
E.M. Forster in Africa
Evelyne Hanquart-Turner. 49
Reading Forster’s Will
Daniel Monk. 61
The Novels
“Facing the Sunshine”: Nature and (Social) Environment in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View
Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad. 83
Posing as Pastoral: The Displacement of the “very poor” in Howards End
John Attridge. 97
O/other and the Creation of the Self in E.M. Forster’s Howards End
Elif Derya Şenduran. 119
Travel and Transformations: The Transcultural Predicament of Female Travellers in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924)
Nadia Butt . 141
Modern Hindu Reformers’ View of Hinduism Reflected in A Passage to India: “Caves” as a Symbol of the Universal Formless God, and “Temple” as Idolatry
Toshiyuki Nakamichi . 163
6 Contents
Short Stories
Hotel Melodrama in E.M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” and “The Story of the Siren”
Athanasios Dimakis. 189
“So Far No Other”: Alterity in Forster’s “The Other Boat”
Anastasia Logotheti . 213
Dystopian Space in E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”
Marcin Tereszewski. 225
Encounters with Forster
E.M. Forster and the Legacy of Aestheticism: “Kipling’s Poems” (1909) and Forster’s Dialogue with Max Beerbohm
Margaret D. Stetz. 239
Forster, Kipling and India: Friendship in the Colony
Harish Trivedi . 259
The Mother-Child Relationship in E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Hisashi Ozawa. 283
“Go West!” In Search of the “Greenwood” in Mike Parker’s On the Red Hill
Robert Kusek . 305
Conference Reports
Re-Orientating E.M. Forster: Texts, Contexts, Receptions. The Cambridge Forster Conference 2020
J.H.D. Scourfield. 323
“E.M. Forster’s Legacies Half a Century After His Death: Nostalgia, Heritage and Queer”. Conference Report
Kaoru Urano, Takahiro Mimura, Saeko Nagashima, Masayuki Iwasaki. 335
Contents 7
Reviews
Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai, 2020. Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster’s Maurice. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 281
Fraser Riddell. 339
Krzysztof Fordoński and Anna Kwiatkowska (eds.), 2021. The World of E.M. Forster – E.M. Forster and the World. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 167
Ewa Kujawska-Lis. 343
E.M. Forster. His Longest Journey, documentary, DVD, November 2020. Produced and directed by Adrian Munsey & Vance Goodwin. Narrated by James Wilby
Anna Kwiatkowska. 347
Heather Green and J.C. Green, 2020. Forster in 50. Dorking: The Cockerel Press, pp. 28.
Krzysztof Fordoński . 351

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- by Krzysztof Fordonski and +1
  Anna Kwiatkowska
- •
- 11
  English Literature, Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, English Novel

Bibliography of Critical Studies in the works of E. M. Forster - published in the Polish Journal of English Studies 7.2/2021 - covering the period 1975-2021

The publication of E.M. Forster’s Commonplace Book in 1978 allowed researchers access, for the first time, into the mind of one of the 20th Century’s most important novelists. For a writer whose work, “more completely than for most... more

The publication of E.M. Forster’s Commonplace Book in 1978 allowed researchers access, for the first time, into the mind of one of the 20th Century’s most important novelists. For a writer whose work, “more completely than for most writers,” according to editor Philip Gardener, “is his monument,” the availability of Forster’s diary cum reading log allows insight into many of the forces that shaped the novelist’s work (Forster CB xii). If anything, it demonstrates the extent to which Forster was one of the most well read men of his generation, with citations ranging from the early Church Fathers to Proust, Eliot, Defoe, Fielding, Beaumont and Flecher, Lawrence, Tolstoy, and, briefly, Richard Wagner. Forster’s private musings, however, contain precious little commentary about his own work. What does exist is generally self-deprecating and reproachful. Forster does acknowledge Howards End to be his “best novel […] approaching a good novel,” but he immediately states “I do not care for it: not a single character in it for whom I care” (Forster CB 203-4)
While time has been kinder to Howards End than Forster was to it himself, the novel is in many ways, very much tied to the time in which it was written. It reflects many of the currents of thought that were present in the Edwardian period. Mechanization, industrialization, the expansion of Empire, the destruction of a rural way of life, and increasing class differences are each, in turn, represented in the novel. Similarly, the role of art and the position of the artist are explored by setting them in relief against the growing societal demands for money, power, and prestige.
In this manner Forster pays homage to another artist who grappled with many of these same problems at the end of the 19th Century. Richard Wagner’s revolutionary musikdramas, which sought to fuse music and drama represents a radical break from the staid continental traditions of grand opera. Not content to be simply a composer, however, Wagner had a definite social agenda that he sought to advance via music and prose, two genres that he increasingly sought to combine. In like manner Forster attempts to advance his own social agenda through his novel which unites “prose with passion.” This paper demonstrates the influence of Wagner’s social philosophy on Forster’s Howards End.

Often criticised for its escapist ending, Maurice is surprisingly radical if viewed in the tradition of nineteenth-century political writings. The Chartist writers of the 1840s did not have a solution for the Condition of England question... more

The article discusses the typical structural devises of E. M. Forster's fiction such as the use of self-imposed exile as the solution which replaces a happy ending.

In this article, I look at E.M. Forster's treatment of tourism in his Italian novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908), by taking the figure of the tourist as a trope for the (English) liberal. Through a... more

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- by Sofia Sampaio
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- 3
  Liberalism, Tourism, E.M. Forster

Free access to full text at http://www.academia.edu/2240914/The_Linguistic_Academy_Journal_of_Interdisciplinary_Language_Studies_vol.2 The article begins with a brief presentation of the presence of English tourists in Italy, starting... more

Erlich, initial compiler of CLOCKWORKS 2, an on-line wiki on "The Human/Machine Interface in SF," brings together briefly often-made points on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and "The Machine Stops," stressing the usefulness of the middle part of... more

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- by Richard Erlich
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- 8
  Technology, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Film, Stanley Kubrick

In 1909, E.M. Forster gave a lecture about Rudyard Kipling. Forster considered Kipling a skillful but dangerous poet. For postcolonial scholars, this lecture will be extremely useful, as it indicates that Forster and other modernists... more

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- by Beniamin Kłaniecki
- •
- 3
  Queer Studies, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood

The revolution of Imam Hussain (pbuh) has reached all corners of the world because Imam Hussain sacrificed himself, his family members, his supporters and companions, in the Battle of Karbala to stand for all what is noble, sublime, and... more

The revolution of Imam Hussain (pbuh) has reached all corners of the world because Imam Hussain sacrificed himself, his family members, his supporters and companions, in the Battle of Karbala to stand for all what is noble, sublime, and exalted in the history of humanity, and not only to defend Islamic values. For this reason, in particular, it is generally agreed that the aims of his revolution against tyranny, corruption, ignorance, and injustice are not confined to Muslims only but they are universal. That is why many worldwide non-Muslim leaders took Imam Hussain as a model in their struggle and achieved glorious victories against their oppressors. A good example of this kind is the Indian political and spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948 A.D).
The commemoration of the valiant sacrifice of Imam Hussain takes different forms and patterns. It depends on the levels of comprehension and understanding of the revolution of Imam Hussain that the people who perform Muharram observances possess. Some Shiite-Muslim communities are fully aware of the essence of Imam Hussain’s noble case while the knowledge of others does not even penetrate its shell. It is noticed that western writers concentrate on the latter slice of Shiite-Muslims with little exaggeration and much confusion which gives the western reader a hazy and distorted image of the revolution of Imam Hussain.
It is the main objective of this article to make an attempt to substitute the misshapen image of Muharram observances in the imagination of its western intended readers by their true image. This aim is particularly achieved through showing the vision that E.M. Forster (1879-1970 A.D) delineates in his masterpiece A Passage to India of Muharram observances.
The paper attempted first to provide an accurate definition of Muharram observances which can never be understood unless ideological and historical accounts of the story of Islam are put forth, starting with the death of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh and his progeny) and ending in Imam Hussain’s murder. The paper, then, attempted to juxtapose the Muslim-Shiite scholars’ understanding of Muharram observances with that of western writers, giving the western reader a precious opportunity to take knowledge from its authentic source. After that, the paper gave a detailed and transparent analysis of the way in which Forster portrays Muharram observances in his A Passage to India.
Finally, the conclusion sums up the findings of the article.

Les hommages à Alexandrie, individuels et collectifs, ne manquent pas. Mais tous se focalisent sur une période restreinte, antique ou moderne. À une exception, illustre : Pharos and Pharillon de E. M. Forster, recueil où l'essai côtoie la... more

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- by Sophie Basch
- •
- 10
  Egypt, Lieux de memoire, Edward Morgan Forster, Graeco-Roman Alexandria

In contrast to being ‘fairly straightforward’ treatments of ‘repressed homosexuality’, many of Forster’s posthumous short stories respond to inhibited sexuality in highly self-conscious ways that inflect their very form. ‘The Other Boat’... more

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- by Fraser Davidson
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- 3
  Queer Theory, Modernism, E.M. Forster

Explains my thesis to a broad, public audience: a version of the lecture given at my doctoral defence on 15 April 2011. Divided into two sections, the first entitled 'Reconceptualising Literary Place', proposing an approach that I call... more

This paper focuses on the concept of techno-fundamentalism which side sidesteps politics in favor of taking on social problems and translating them into technical solutions. The article provides an analysis of the opportunities and... more

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- by Amro Ali
- •
- 18
  Sociology, Social Movements, Political Philosophy, Ethics

E.M. Forster

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