Aspects of the NovelThe book includes a course of lectures (the annual Clark Lectures) which were delivered by E.M. Forster under the auspices of Trinity College, Cambridge in the spring of 1927. The driving force behind this book, according to the author, is the effort to see through novels and not round them. He discards the weighty ?historical? view with its cumbersome apparatus of ?tendencies?, ?influences? and ?periods? and instead imagines all novelists at work together in a circular room. Appreciating the work, Arnold Bennett says that ?I have never met this kind of perspicacity in literary criticism before. I could quote scores of examples of startling excellence.? The book is full of E.M. Forster?s habitual wit, wisdom and freshness of approach. According to Oliver Stallybrass, it is ?an excellent introduction to its subject, and a useful adjunct to other, more sustained and consistent works of criticism.? |