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film |theatre |culture |musical |opera |E.M. Forster |literature |television |adaptation |Adaptation Studies

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The article aims at charting the position of Edward Morgan Forster and his works in contemporary English language culture. It presents various forms of adaptations of or responses to the works of Forster, concentrating on those which have been created since the writer’s death in 1970. The discussed material consists of approximately one hundred instances of various works of art related in a number of ways to Forster’s oeuvre and biography: adaptations, works inspired by Forster’s oeuvre or biography, and, finally, works which enter into a dialogue with Forster and his views. Radio plays, operas, plays, movies, musicals, comic books, concept albums, etc. have been included as well. The paper also touches upon Forster’s reception among scholars and in political journalism. The paper is supplemented with lists of various adaptations.

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travel writing |Forster |Africa |colonialism

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The paper presents a less known episode of E.M. Forster life – his African voyage in 1929. The paper retraces Forster’s trip through references in his published and private non-fiction writings, essays and letters, as well as its influence on his late short story “The Life to Come.”

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E.M. Forster |inheritance |wills

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Despite the extensive scholarship about Forster’s life and work, his will has largely been overlooked. This article aims to fill this gap and presents a reading of his will which treats it not simply as a functional legal document but as a biographical, sociological and, arguably, a literary text. In doing so it demonstrates the importance for Forster of inheritance as a complex ethical practice. In particular it focuses on how the bequests and extensive individual legacies in the will convey the same political beliefs and personal values which are found in his novels, and are similarly open to contested and contradictory interpretations. In this way and in reading the will against Maurice, it is argued that Forster’s will is an overlooked posthumous publication.

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nature |E.M. Forster |Environment |Transcendentalism |Individualism |diversity |A Room with a View

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The relationship between nature and humans has been widely explored in literature. Spirituality, through which both human individuals and nature are connected, is the core concept in British and American transcendentalism, whose ideas permeate E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View (1908). Forster’s stance on nature and its role in the life of humans is striking in this narrative and enables multiple interpretations that are relevant today when eco-awareness is one of humanity’s key goals. This article examines the intricate relationship between nature and humans that Forster establishes via both the narrative structure and the characters, and argues that it is through the depictions of nature and the environment that the author celebrates individualism and diversity. Yet it is also with the help of overt comparisons and parallelism of environmental fluctuations with the events that happen in the lives of the main characters that Forster introduces a unique ecological philosophy, underlining the inseparability of humans from nature and vice versa, thus expressing both humility and rapture with regard to the created symbiosis, its beauty and inscrutability.

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Howards End |Forster |pastoral |poor |rural

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There is a yearning for the pastoral idyll that lies at the heart of Howards End, but Forster’s veneration for the rural is often complicated by its dependence on lower-class characters who do not feature prominently within the text. Instead, the author’s penchant for pastoral imagery is more commonly aligned with his upper-middle-class protagonists, who come to find peace and beauty among the natural surroundings of the English country-house. This paper seeks to examine the degree to which Forster might have been conscious of this displacement of the “very poor” within the novel, and to critically untangle his offhand-claim that he was “not concerned” with the lives or livelihood of such people who nevertheless contribute their labour in service of an idealized pastoral landscape he so passionately admires. In determining Forster’s intentions behind contrasting two so distinctly opposing socio-economic groups, we might also unearth some of the author’s more intricate anxieties about the Edwardian class system, and how the author might reconcile what many critics have labelled his ‘bourgeois-liberal guilt’ with his unmistakeable admiration for a rural working-life so emblematic of the pastoral condition.

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Howards End |Lacanian epistemology |O/other |Moebius band |sinthome

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The aim of this article is to explore the symbiotic relationship between the Lacanian Other and the imaginary other in E.M. Forster’s Howards End by using Lacanian and Braidotti’s epistemology. In doing so, it explores the binary oppositions, such as rational/irrational, wo/man, culture/nature, mechanic/chaotic, inside/outside, other/nonother by referring to Lacanian topology of Moebius band. The loop of the band suggests the binary patterns are never oppositions but reversed images of one another in the novel. The two families, the Schlegels, and the Wilcoxes act on this trajectory of the Moebius band structure so their images are reversed due to a twist, trauma, by which the linearity of the structure is broken because of the lack of a shared Other. This leads to the ambivalence of the characters in the novel. Paul’s mission, which reincarnates as the authority or the Other, obstructs the continuity of his relationship with Helen. Helen’s sinthome, in other words, art and literature, coheres the rising tension with “panic and emptiness” within her psychodynamics but the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels are never O/other for each other in the novel.

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journey motif |female travellers |transcultural predicaments |colonial India |imperialism

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Travelling to a new continent and undertaking a journey is often the most fundamental aspect of colonial and postcolonial literatures, especially in the genre of the novel. This article seeks to address travel as an agent of transformation in relation to the transcultural predicament of female travellers in E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924). By seeking a connection between gender and travel, the article demonstrates that the passage to India turns out to be a life-changing experience for the two women travellers, Adela Quested and Mrs Moore, who demonstrate different travel motives, expectations, and goals as compared with their male counterparts. By going beyond the discussion of the novel as a study in anti/colonialism and the impossibility of East meeting West, I set out to examine how the position and status of women on the move in the early phase of twentieth-century literature helps to comprehend the crucial role of travel in shaping their private spheres, particularly the suppressed sides of their self and sexuality within the colonial, imperial, male dominated framework. Moreover, I also investigate how these female travellers despite challenging and contesting colonial engagements within their limited domain end up in only aggravating their transcultural predicament during and upon the end of their journeys. Hence, the article looks deeper into the role of female travellers in the novel as they struggle to define themselves in a new cultural and geographical landscape.

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A Passage to India |Neoplatonism |Brahman |Advaita Vedānta |Hindu Reform Movements

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Although there has been a generally agreed interpretation of both “Caves” and “Temple” as the symbols of Hinduism, the structural relationship between the two symbols has been interpreted differently. This paper aims to elucidate the relationship between “Caves” and “Temple” by exploring how Forster’s perception of Hinduism was formed and reflected in the novel, assuming the influence of the monotheistic modern Hindu reformers, the Brahmo Samaj’s concept of “Brahman” and Plotinus’ concept of “the One” as its Western philosophical counterpart. It is found that “Caves” symbolizes “Nirguna Brahman” (Brahman without attributes), the Universal Formless God, while “Temple” symbolizes “Saguna Brahman” (Brahman with attributes), Krishna, or the eighth avatar of Vishnu. Forster represents the Marabar Caves as the nothingness of “Nirguna Brahman,” assuming that “good and evil are the same” in Hinduism, leading Adela and Mrs Moore towards moral nihilism. Forster’s representation of the Indian idea of nothingness reflects the nineteenth-century Western philosophers’ now out-dated concept of nihilism, which regards Early Buddhism’s “nirvana” (developed into “sunyata,” and later further into Advaita Vedanta’s “maya”) as the will for nothingness.

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E.M. Forster |literary hotels |melodrama |Queer Modernism |short stories

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Ostensibly unconnected and critically underexplored, E.M. Forster’s hotel-related stories “The Story of a Panic” (1904) and “The Story of the Siren” (1920) seem to resonate with genuine hotel-generated melodrama(s). Both short stories were inspired by Forster’s respective hotel sojourns in Ravello and what reads as a synthetic amalgam of Palermo and Capri. They both belong to Forster’s Italian hotel literature and point to the author’s consistent hotel literariness. The geographical proximity of these (Tyrrhenian) hotel stories only accentuates the irony of the overarching tautological formula. The essay traces the new modes of being that Forster’s male protagonists dare to experience maintaining that they point to Forster’s modernist dialectics with the already established thread of literary melodrama. Viewing these stories through the lens of melodrama – manifested in the avant-garde sentimentality, queer ostentation, exaggeration, flamboyance, and theatricality of their protagonists – the essay serves to highlight their emotive potential culminating in the unsettlement of stereotypes. In a decidedly modernist turn, both “The Story of a Panic” and “The Story of the Siren” open up the possibility for unchartered territories and new modes of being, while triggering a backward dialectical movement that brings forth the forlorn legacy of melodrama as per Peter Brooks’ formulation. Thus, they generate genuine hotel melodrama.

The essay is part of a research project entitled “Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890–1940,” supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty members and Researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment grant” (Project Number: 1653).

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E.M. Forster |“The Other Boat” |alterity |other(ness) |Orientalism

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Posthumously published in the collection The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972), the story “The Other Boat” (began in 1913 and completed in 1957–8) has long been considered “a worthy finale to Forster’s fiction” (Stallybrass 1987, xvii). This essay explores the foregrounding of alterity in “The Other Boat” within the context of imperialist politics. The significant use of the term “other” in the story problematizes hierarchies and interrogates binaries of inclusion/exclusion. Highlighting alterity, “The Other Boat” engages with the colonizer/colonized dichotomy in ways suggestive of postcolonial conceptualizations of otherness. Thus, the story explores ideologies predicated upon what Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) terms the Orient’s “foreignness” and illustrates the conditions which preserve the Orient’s “permanent estrangement from the West” (Said 1978, 244).

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Fredric Jameson |E.M. Forster |spatiality |dystopia

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E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) is an anomaly in his literary career. Not only is this story one of his very few science fiction works, but it is also one of the first dystopian science fiction works in the English language. Nonetheless, until recently it has received rather scant critical attention. Among the critical studies to date, the spatial environment in this short story has received no critical consideration. This study attempts to illustrate the possibilities of approaching this narrative in more spatial terms. Specifically, it seeks to explore the spatial configurations and how they relate to dystopian aesthetics, how corporal disintegration as represented in this short story is correlated to a loss of self-identity. The theoretical backdrop of this study falls within the purview of the so-called “spatial turn” in literary studies and will partially draw on postmodern aspects of spatiality developed by Fredric Jameson.

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E.M. Forster |Max Beerbohm |Rudyard Kipling |Aestheticism |modernism

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E.M. Forster’s 1909 lecture on Rudyard Kipling’s poetry was a key document in his development as a critic. He used this talk as an occasion to re-examine his relationship to the “Art-for-Art’s-Sake” principles of the late-Victorian Aesthetic Movement, which continued to guide influential contemporaries such as the artist and author, Max Beerbohm, with whom Forster had both personal and professional connections. Distinguishing his own responses to Kipling from those of Beerbohm, as expressed through the latter’s savagely satirical visual works, was a necessary step in Forster’s forging of an individual voice for the modern age. But despite Forster’s wish always to avoid labels and to escape being identified with inflexible positions, he turned in his later years to open advocacy of Art for Art’s Sake.

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nationalism |imperialism |E.M. Forster |Rudyard Kipling |colonial friendship |sexual politics |spirituality

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Both E.M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling in their major Indian novels, A Passage to India and Kim, valorised friendship across the imperial and racial divide. In this comparative and contrapuntal study of these classic novels about India, I attempt to see how they negotiate the complications caused in personal relationships by haughty imperial attitudes on the one hand, and resistant nationalism on the other. Another dimension underlying the personal relationships in these narratives is that of sexual politics in instances where friendship leads to intimacy with dramatic consequences. The opposite of this perhaps is an attempt to sublimate the personal and the empirical into the spiritual, a trend evidenced in different ways in both. Finally, I refer to the work done on Forster and Kipling by a few other Indian scholars, to see how they engage with the issues outlined here.

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reproduction |E.M. Forster |Aldous Huxley |mother-child relationship |futuristic story

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This article compares E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) by focussing on the mother-child relationship in order to explore the relation between these works, particularly the influence of the former on the latter. The article first compares Vashti and Kuno in “The Machine Stops” with Linda and John in Brave New World. Both mothers appear to represent technology, progress, and rationalism, while both sons appear to represent nature, tradition, and imagination, but the two texts deconstruct this binary opposition to a certain degree. These futuristic narratives also depict a mother’s mixed feelings of love and hatred towards her son as well as an indefinable, special relationship between mother and child, who look identical but are different individuals. Compared with Forster’s story, Huxley’s novel delves deeply into the psychology of the son and closely delineates the rational system of reproduction. These differences, to some extent, reflect the development of contemporary contexts of psychoanalysis and reproduction. The present article concludes that, regarding his representation of mother and son, Huxley owed much to Forster in terms of theme, plot, and characters.

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E.M. Forster |new nature writing |queer rurality |queer heritage |Mike Parker

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The aim of this paper is to investigate the legacy of E.M. Forster’s queer rurality – the writer’s famous “greenwood” – in Mike Parker’s On the Red Hill, a 2019 memoir which brings together the political and aesthetic concerns of queer anti-urbanism and new nature writing. While analysing Forsterian “inheritance” and its impact onto Parker’s book, as well as the lives of its four auto/biographical characters, the essay explores the conjunction between queer sexualities (male nonheteronormativity in particular) and rurality in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the shift that has occurred with regard to the perception (and valorisation) of the non-metropolitan queer life.

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E.M. Forster

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E.M. Forster

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E.M. Forster

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E.M. Forster