This groundbreaking volume presents a radical revision of gay criticism and focuses on E. M. Forster's place in the emerging field of queer studies. Many previous critics of Forster downplayed his homosexuality or read Forster naively in terms of gay liberation. This collection situates Forster within the Bloomsbury Group and examines his relations to major figures such as Henry James, Edward Carpenter, and Virginia Woolf. Particular attention is paid to Forster's several accounts of India and their troubled relation to the British colonial enterprise. Analyzing a wide range of Forster's work, the authors examine material from Forster's undergraduate writings to stories written more than a half-century later. A landmark book for the study of gender in literature, Queer Forster brings the terms "queer" and "gay" into conversation, opening up a dialogue on wider dimensions of theory and allowing a major revaluation of modernist inventions of sexual identity.

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.

The Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies surveys the field in some 470 entries on individuals (Adrienne Rich); arts and cultural studies (Dance); ethics, religion, and philosophical issues (Monastic Traditions); historical figures, periods, and ideas (Germany between the World Wars); language, literature, and communication (British Drama); law and politics (Child Custody); medicine and biological sciences (Health and Illness); and psychology, social sciences, and education (Kinsey Report).

Thisis the first book focused on Forster's Maurice and its legacies in modernand contemporary fiction, film and new media. Ground-breaking essays by leadingscholars offernew readings by exploring overlooked contexts including: feminism and the'social purity' movement; anti-Fascism; religion and allegory; and earlytwentieth-century contestations over body-soul relation.

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.

Through attending to the nonhuman, E. M. Forster’s Material Humanism: Queer Matters places Forster’s fiction in conversation with contemporary debates concerned with the intersection of neomaterialism, environmental humanities and queer ecology. The book revisits Forster’s liberal humanism from a materialist perspective by focusing on humans’ embodied activities in artificial and natural environments. By examining the everyday embodied experiences of characters, the book thus brings to the fore insignificant and sometimes overlooked aspects in Forster’s fiction. It also places importance on the texts’ treatment of queer intimacy as an embodied experience that can transcend sexual desire. The book acknowledges nonhuman agency as central to our understanding of queerness in Forster’s texts and studies the representation of formless matters such as dust as a way through which Forster’s ecological concerns arise by linking the fate of oppressed humans with oppressed nonhuman others.

A collection of essays on the life and work of E. M. Forster.