ABSTRACT

Focusing on the literary works and career of British novelist E.M. Forster (1879-1970), this book argues that the writer adapted a much older literary form, the pastoral, to the purposes of writing about modern British experience. The publication points out that Forster's pastoral fiction challenged conventional parameters for the British novel, allowing for the emergence of his subsequent modernist classic, A Passage to India (including its critique of British imperialism). The monograph also provides a rationale for why Forster subsequently turned his artistic focus beyond Britain, embracing public radio under the direction of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

chapter One|34 pages

Doomed Pastoral

Neohellenism, Liberal Apocalypse, and the “Call of Class” in Howards End and Maurice

chapter Two|24 pages

“A Further Reservation in Favour of Strangeness”

Isherwood's Queer Pastoral in The Mortmere Stories and “On Reugen Island”

chapter Three|21 pages

Akin to Railway Accidents

Textual Realism in Forster's Commonplace Book

chapter Four|27 pages

Butterfly and Pythoness

Modernist Historiography in Woolf's Between the Acts and Forster's “Abinger Pageant”

chapter Five|38 pages

“Distinguishing t'Other from Which”

The Imperial Subject in Sir Andrew Fraser's Rajahs and Ryots and Forster's Howards End

chapter six|18 pages

“Queer Report”

Disappointed Critics and Prophecy in A Passage to India