E.M. Forster

Nicholas Royle presents a new Forster – one that has emerged from the posthumous publication of his explicitly homosexual fiction (since 1971) and from new critical attention to issues of language and textuality, Englishness and national identity, colonialism and postcolonialism, gender and queer theory. Royle provides detailed readings of all Forster’s novels, as well as of critical writings such as his Aspects of the Novel. He explores the idea that Forster wrote not one, but six queer novels. Indeed, contrary to what may seem critical commonsense, this study proposes that Maurice is in some respects Forster’s least queer book. All of his novels, however, are charged with a powerful eroticism and evoke a constant fascination with the generative peculiarities of words themselves. Focusing on such topics as the unforeseeable and the uncanny, deferred meaning and telepathy, Royle argues that Forster’s work is stranger, more complex and compelling than earlier accounts may have suggested.