Queer Forster (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)

It is no longer a secret that famed British novelist E. M. Forster was a homosexual (the posthumous publication of his gay-themed novel Maurice in 1971 made that perfectly clear), but academic criticism has been late in catching up with this news. Even when critics acknowledge Forster's sexuality they rarely discuss its relationship to his fiction. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford's Queer Forster collects 13 essays that analyze the writer's work--including The Longest Journey and his essays on censorship, India, and British politics--in the context of his sexuality and the social and political issues of his time. Forster's relationship to the Bloomsbury Group, many of whom were openly gay as opposed to Forster's more quite life, is discussed at length. More traditionally minded academics complain that this biographical criticism "limits" an understanding of a writer's work, but Queer Forster contains some of the most provocative and insightful contemporary writing on modern British literature.