ABSTRACT
E.M. Forster’s quasi-Bildungsroman, The Longest Journey , is replete with allusions—from title onwards—to a host of authors such as Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Meredith, Henry James, and also to The Book of Genesis, Darwin, and, above all, Ibsen. Forster may have consciously avoided Flaubert’s influence, but the naturalism of Zola’s or Ibsen’s kind seems to have left a deep impression on him. What use does he make of Ibsen in his The Longest Journey, which has numerous allusions to Ghosts? How does the play operate as an intertext and affect our understanding of the novel? And where does that leave Forster in the history of modernist fiction? These are questions that this chapter attempts to address.
