A major reassessment of the one of the greatest English novelist of the twentieth century, from celebrated critic Sir Frank Kermode. CONCERNING E.M. FORSTER is a rich, varied and original portrait of a literary great. When Sir Frank Kermode delivered the Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, he chose E.M. Forster as his subject; these lectures form the core of this book. Kermode reappraises the influence and meaning of Forster's oeuvre, offering a fascinating interpretation of his most celebrated work, A PASSAGE TO INDIA. There follows a series of interweaving discussions that bring to life diverse topics - Empire, class, poverty, the condition of the novel, the role of the artist - but always return to our enigmatic subject. Kermode also reflects on Forster's considerable talent and shortcomings, places him within a wider social context, and casts spotlight on his contemporaries, presenting a unique panorama of twentieth-century English literature.

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

Based on exclusive access to E. M. Forster's previously restricted diaries this scrupulously researched and sensitively written biography is the first to put the fact that he was homosexual back at the heart of his story.

William di Canzio’s Alec, inspired by Maurice, E. M. Forster’s secret novel of a happy same-sex love affair, tells the story of Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper Maurice Hall falls in love with in Forster’s classic, published only after the author's death. Di Canzio follows their story past the end of Maurice to the front lines of battle in World War I and beyond. Forster, who tried to write an epilogue about the future of his characters, was stymied by the radical change that the Great War brought to their world. With the hindsight of a century, di Canzio imagines a future for them and a past for Alec—a young villager possessed of remarkable passion and self-knowledge. Alec continues Forster’s project of telling stories that are part of “a great unrecorded history.” Di Canzio’s debut novel is a love story of epic proportions, at once classic and boldly new.

A critical analysis of the composition of the novel form rather than an historical view.; Includes a section on fantasy as a genre.

A major reassessment of the one of the greatest English novelist of the twentieth century, from celebrated critic Sir Frank Kermode.

After a rich Edwardian widow impulsively marries a handsome but poor Tuscan dentist and dies in childbirth, her English relatives try to gain custody of the baby.