The Achievement of E. M. Forster

A study of Forster’s work which concentrates on the roots of his literary thinking in earlier English Romanticism. The book treats Forster's work in the early short stories, A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, Howards End and A Passage to India. It then discusses the changes in Forster’s thinking after the First World War and the lasting qualities of Forster’s work amidst decaying social cohesion and the loss of imaginative vision.
Contents: 1 Aspects of a Novelist. Different ways of reading Forster’s fiction. 2 The Earth and the Stars. Mythological elements in the early short stories. 3 From a View to a Death. Moments of vision and of moral choice in A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread. 4 Flame Boats on a Stream. The initiation of young men into knowledge of the holiness of the heart’s imagination in The Longest Journey. 5 In Country Sleep. House and tree as binding symbolic forces in Howards End. 6 The Undying Worm. The uses of negative symbolism in A Passage to India. 7 Serving the World. The changes in Forster’s thinking after the First World War and the impact of the Second. 8 In and Out of Time. The lasting qualities of Forster’s work amidst decaying social cohesion and the loss of imaginative vision.

John Beer is well known for his work on English Romantic literature. He has lectured in India and the U.S.A. as well as at Manchester and Cambridge, where he is now Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Peterhouse. His books include Coleridge the Visionary, Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, Blake's Humanism, Blake's Visionary Universe, Wordsworth and the Human Heart, Wordsworth in Time, Questioning Romanticism (ed.), Romantic Consciousness: Blake to Mary Shelley, Post-Romantic Consciousness: Dickens to Sylvia Plath, Romantic Influences and William Blake: A Literary Life.