1.- INTRODUCTION

- Biography

2.- AGE AND LITERARY MOVEMENT

3.-INFLUENCES ON EDWARD MORGAN FORSTER

4.-LITERARY WORKS OF E.M. FORSTER

5.- BASIC THEMES IN HIS NOVELS

-The Death and the Immortality

-The Nature in Forster’s novels

-The Humanism

-Human Relationships

6.- FORMAL ASPECTS OF HIS NOVELS

-Use of the Dialogues

7.- SOCIAL, CULTURAL AND RACIAL CONFLICTS IN HIS NOVELS

8.- BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.- Biography.

2.- Age and literary movement.

1.- BIOGRAPHY (From Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Forster, E(dward) M(organ) was born in London in 1.879 and died in Coventry, Warwickshire, in 1970. British novelist, essayist, and social and literary critic. His fame rests largely on his novels Howards Ends (1.910) and A Passage to India (1.924) and on a large body of criticism.

Forster’s father, an architect, died when the son was a baby, and he was brought up by his mother and paternal aunts. The difference between the two families, his father’s being a strongly evangelical with a high sense of moral responsibility, and his mother’s more feckless and generous-minded, gave him an enduring insight into the nature of domestic tensions, while his education as a dayboy (day student) at Tonbridge School, Kent, was responsible for many of his later criticisms of the English public school (private) system. At King’s College, Cambridge, he enjoyed a sense of liberation. For first time he was free to follow his own intellectual inclinations; and he gained a sense of the uniqueness of the individual, of the healthiness of moderate scepticism, and of the importance of Mediterranean civilization as a counterbalance to the more straitlaced attitudes of northern European countries.

On leaving Cambridge, Forster decided to devote his life to writing. His first novels and short stories were redolent of an age that was shaking off the shackles of Victorianism. While adopting certain themes (the importance of women in their own right, for example) from earlier English novelists such as George Meredith, he broke with the elaborations and intricacies favoured in the late 19^th century and wrote in a freer, more colloquial style. From the first his novels included a strong strain of social comment, based on acute observation of middle-class life. There was also a deeper concern, however, a belief, associated with Forster’s interest in Mediterranean "paganism", that, if men and women were to achieve a satisfactory life, they needed to keep contact with the earth and to cultivate their imaginations. In early novel, The Longest Journey (1907), he suggested that cultivation of either in isolation is not enough, reliance on the earth alone leading to a genial brutishness and exagerated development of imagination undermining the individual’s sense of reality.

The same theme runs through Howards End, a more ambitious novel that brought Forster his first major success. The novel is conceived in terms of an alliance between the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, who embody the liberal imagination at its best, and Ruth Wilcox, the owner of the house Howards End, which has remained close to the earth for generations; spiritually they recognize a kinship against the values of Henry Wilcox and his children, who conceive life mainly in terms of commerce. In a symbolic ending, Margaret Schlegel marries Henry Wilcox and brings him back, a broken man, to Howards End, reestablishing there a link (however heavily threatened by the forces of progress around it) between the imagination and the earth.

The resolution is a precarious one, and World War I was to undermine it still further. Forster spent three wartime years in Alexandria, doing civilian war work, and visited India twice, in 1.912-13 and in 1.921. When he returned to former themes in his postwar novel A Passage to India, they presented themselves in a negative form: against the vaster scale of India, in which the earth itself seems alien, a resolution between it and the imagination could appear as almost impossible to achieve. Only Adela Quested, the young girl who is most open to experience, can glimpse their possible concord, and then only momentarily, in the courtroom during the trial at which she is the central witness. Much of the novel is devoted to less spectacular values: those of seriousness and truthfulness (represented here by the administrator Fielding) and of an outgoing and benevolent sensibility (embodied in the English visitor Mrs. Moore). Neither Fielding nor Mrs. Moore is totally successful; neither totally fails. The novel ends in an uneasy equilibrium. Immediate reconciliation between Indians and British is ruled out, but the further possibilities inherent in Adela’s experience, along with the surrounding uncertainties, are echoed in the ritual birth of the God of Love amid scenes of confusion at a Hindu festival.

The values of truthfulness and kindness dominate Forster’s later thinking. A reconciliation of humanity to the earth and its own imagination may be the ultimate ideal, but Forster sees it receding in a civilization devoting itself more and more to technological progress. The values of common sense, goodwill, and regard for the individual, on the other hand, can still be cultivated, and these underlie Forster’s later pleas for more liberal attitudes. During World War II he acquired a position of particular respect as a man who had never been seduced by totalitarianisms of any kind and whose belief in personal relationships and the simple decencies seemed to embody some of the common values behind the fight against Nazism and Fascim. In 1.946 his old college gave him an honorary fellowship, which enabled him to make his home in Cambridge and to keep in communication with both old and young until his death.

Although the later Forster is an important figure in mid-20^th-century culture, his emphasis on a kindly, uncommitted, and understated morality being congenial to many of his contemporaries, it is by his novels that he is more likely to be remembered, and these are best seen in the context of the preceding Romantic tradition. The novels sustain the cult of the heart’s affections that was central to that tradition, but they also share with the first Romantics a concern for the status of man in nature and for his imaginative life, a concern that remains important to an age that has turned against other aspects of Romanticism.

2.- AGE AND LITERARY MOVEMENT (From Encyclopaedia Britannica)

THE EDWARDIANS.

The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the onset of a new millennium. For many, mankind was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells's utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced by ones more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker, less inhibited era had begun. Many writers of the Edwardian period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the 19th century (upon Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and Dickens in fiction) and in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an unashamedly didactic one. In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which Man and Superman (performed 1905, published 1903) and Major Barbara (performed 1905, published 1907) are the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the function of class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation. Nor was he alone in this, even if he was alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John Galsworthy made use of the theatre in Strife (1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and in Justice (1910) he lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to change theatrical production in the period, dissected in The Voysey Inheritance (performed 1905, published 1909) and Waste (performed 1907, published 1909) the hypocrisies and deceit of upper-class and professional life. Many Edwardian novelists were similarly eager to explore the shortcomings of English social life. Wells—in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps (1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his pro-suffragette novel; and The History of Mr. Polly (1910)—captured the frustrations of lower- and middle-class existence, even though he relieved his accounts with many comic touches. In Anna of the Five Towns (1902) Arnold Bennett detailed the constrictions of provincial life among the self-made business classes in the area of England known as the Potteries; in The Man of Property (1906), the first volume of The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy described the destructive possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie; and in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907) E.M. Forster portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and philistinism of the English middle classes. These novelists, however, wrote more memorably when they allowed themselves a larger perspective. In The Old Wives' Tale (1908) Bennett showed the destructive effects of time on the lives of individuals and communities and evoked a quality of pathos that he never matched in his other fiction; in Tono-Bungay (1909) Wells showed the ominous consequences of the uncontrolled developments taking place within a British society still dependent upon the institutions of a long-defunct landed aristocracy; and in Howards End (1910) Forster showed how little the rootless and self-important world of contemporary commerce cared for the more rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil. Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the present, most Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the theatre, held firmly to the belief not only that constructive change was possible but also that this change could in some measure be advanced by their writing. Other writers, including Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, who had established their reputations during the previous century, and Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Thomas, who established their reputations in the first decade of the new century, were less confident about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms—the ballad, the narrative poem, the satire, the fantasy, the topographical poem, and the essay—that in their view preserved traditional sentiments and perceptions. The revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th century was not a unique event. There have been many such revivals during the 20th century, and the traditional poetry of A.E. Housman (whose book A Shropshire Lad, originally published in 1896, enjoyed huge popular success during World War I), Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden represents an important and often neglected strand of English literature in the first half of the century. The most significant writing of the period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired by neither hope nor apprehension but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain involved in the South African War (the Boer War; 1899-1902), and it seemed to some that the British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and from without, as had been the Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and style that many British poets were to use in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had done much to engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse and short stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it would bring. No one captured the sense of an imperial civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the expatriate American novelist Henry James. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) he had briefly anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and in The Princess Casamassima (1886) had described more directly the various instabilities that threatened its paternalistic rule. He did so with regret: the patrician American admired in the English upper class its sense of moral obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he had noted a disturbing change. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What Maisie Knew (1897) members of the upper class no longer seem troubled by the means adopted to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great Britain had become indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an ugly rapacity had never been far from the surface. James's dismay at this condition gave to his subtle and compressed late fiction, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and air of disenchantment. James's awareness of crisis affected the very form and style of his writing, for he was no longer assured that the world about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or unambiguously intelligible to its inhabitants. His fiction still presented characters within an identifiable social world, but he found his characters and their world increasingly elusive and enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he made clear in The Sacred Fount (1901), the questionable consequence of artistic will. Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in the Ukraine of Polish parents), shared James's sense of crisis but attributed it less to the decline of a specific civilization than to the failings of mankind itself. Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning upon the world because he could not endure a world that did not reflect his central place within it. In Almayer's Folly (1895) and Lord Jim (1900) he had seemed to sympathize with this predicament; but in "Heart of Darkness" (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) he detailed such imposition, and the psychological pathologies he increasingly associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a philosophical novelist whose concern with the mocking limits of human knowledge affected not only the content of his fiction but also its very structure. His writing itself is marked by gaps in the narrative, by narrators who do not fully grasp the significance of the events they are retelling, and by characters who are unable to make themselves understood. James and Conrad used many of the conventions of 19th-century realism but transformed them to express what are considered to be peculiarly 20th-century preoccupations and anxieties.

3.- Influences on Edward M. Forster

4.- Literary works of E. M. Forster

5.- Basic themes in his novels

6.- Formal aspects of his novels

7.- Social, cultural and racial conflicts in his novels.

As Maria Isabel Butler writes, Forster is an essentially English novelist inside the traditional atmosphere en the evolution of the novel and "which narrative style is primordial and genuinously British."

Edward Forster confessed his own literary influences in this way:

Samuel Butler influenced me a great deal. He, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust are the three authors who helped me most over my writing, and he did more than either of the other two to help me to look at life the way I do.

But there were also another type of influences in addition to the English. He felt admiration for the extrange narrative as we can see:

Most people agree that Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the greatest novel that western civilization has produced. Which novel is the second greatest? I suggest Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Other factor that influenced a lot the life and works of Forster was the victorianism in English society in his own time. This movement receives its name from the Queen Victoria, which was worried about maintaining the "status" and the social morality more than aspirate to the personal integrity. Forster attacked the social hypocrisy of Victorian moral, its Puritanism and "the public school system"

In spite of everything said in this paragraph, they are some proper words of G.D. Klingopulos respect to the possible influences on E.M. Forster:

The enumeration of influences, however extended, will not add up to an explanation of the impression we have of Mr. Forster. (...) He is one of the few modern English writers whose work reveals the process of assimilation and growth of a genuine sensibility, by which we mean something different from style, or technique, or learning.

4.- LITERARY WORKS OF E.M.FORSTER

Edward Morgan Forster was a prolific writer. The first of his novels and the most briefly is Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). As it is expressed by A. Sánchez Calvo: "From the moment that the two main characters find each other, the novel is converted in a kind of comparative study between the Italian world, spontaneous, primitive and natural, represented by the city of Monteriano, and the English world, sophisticated, repressive and conventional, in the city of Sawston."

Forster is clear about his opinion in the novel. He sais about Mrs. Herriton:

Her life (...) was without meaning. To what purpose was her diplomacy, her insincerity, her continued repression of vigour? Did they make anyone better or happier? Did they even bring happiness to herself?

The feeling that predominates in the whole novel is what resumes Philip Gardner with this words:

There is a strong feeling in the book that action, even if it involves mistakes, is preferable to observation; and that mistakes can themselves lead to right action.

The second novel was The Longest Journey, and as it is expressed by Alan Wilde, the most autobiographic:

... a spiritual biography of what Forster felt himself to be, what he might become, and what he would like to have been.

A. Sánchez Calvo said: "one of the aspects most interesting in this novel is, maybe, the opposition between Stephen: instinctive, vitalist and natural, who remember us to Gino, and Rickie: sickly, painful, full of inhibitions and defeats."

Sánchez Calvo said also that: "the friendship between Rickie and Ansell have been interpreted, in general, as an homosexual relation. This is corroborate in the letter Rickie writes to Ansell answer of the letter Ansell had send to Rickie before in which he sais:"

But this letter of yours is the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me yet more wonderful (I don’t exaggerate) than the moment when Agnes promised to marry me, I always knew you liked me, but I never knew how much until this letter.(...)

A Room with a View is the third novel and the second one in an Italian ambient.

As Philip Gardner said: "A Room with a View (...) is a simpler and sunnier book, beginning in Florence with the discovery of love and, after an interval of "muddle", ending there with what promises to be a happy marriage."

It is also very interesting the comment of Denis Godfrey: " A Room with a View has been after all no more than a second demonstration after Where Angels Fear to Tread of the redemptive power of the Italian unseen in impact upon the English character.

This novel from the point of view of J.S.Martin is another approximation of Forster that reflects "the difficulty of being true to oneself and to others in a precarious world largely governed by chance-a world in which good and bad, clarity and muddle, violence and love are inextricably interwined and as much a part of the nature of things as time and change themselves"

In A Passage to India, Christopher Gillie said that is:

a study in cultural contrast, and not merely the contrast between

British and Indian cultures, but a triangular one of the British, the

Moslem, and the Hindu. Most important of all, it is a study of the

difference between a culture in which religion has lost its importance-

the British; one in which religion has become chiefly a cultural support- the Moslem; and one in which religion is inherent in every context of life-the Hindu.

Regarding to the relationships in this novel, J.S.Martin said: " A Passage to India is in part the story of three personal relationships, all of which, under the force of circumstances largely beyond the control of the individuals concerned, disintegrate."

Lionel Trilling said that the theme of the death is one of the most important in Forster:

It (death) is deeply related to Forster’s view of life and it is

insignificant that not only in "The Road to Colonus" but in two other of the early stories ("The Point of it" and "The Story of the Siren") Forster has already begun to deal with it.

Trilling also said:

Forster is not a mystic in any precise sense of the word. Yet there is an element in his work that does give the appearance of mysticism: it is his sense of life being confronted by death. A money-civilization chooses not to consider this confrontation; it is one of our most pertinacious refusals and we support it by calling "mystical" anyone who does consider it.

Forster also spoke in first person about what death means to him:

I am worried by thoughts of a war oftener than by thoughts of my own death, yet the line to be adopted over those two nuisances is the same. One must behave as if one is immortal, and as if civilisation is eternal. Both statements are false - I shall not survive, no more will the great globe itself-, but both of them must be assumed to be true if we are to go eating and working and travelling, and keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.

Regarding to The Longest Journey, P.J.M.Scott said:

The Longest Journey is the last great Romantic perception of our landscape. The novel celebrates - and with a fidelity, a perception, as keen as Wordsworth’s- that era in which Man had reduced the English terrain from its primordial savagery (even in the eleventh century very much of the country was still boars and endless swamps) to a "civilized" organism which yet held its own "against" the powers of its human inhabitants.

As Peter Burra said: "We cannot doubt that is urged upon us in The Long Journey is the return to nature- what is emphasized is the value of the earth."

It is really relevant what said Glen Cavaliero:

Forster’s novels and tales are full of memorable places. Atmosphere is what interests him most: the spiritual qualities of India, Wiltshire, San Gimignano are conveyed to us more vividly even than the physical.

H.J. Blackham has a definition of Forster’s humanism: "Humanism proceeds from an assumption that is on his own and this life is all and an assumption of responsibility for one’s own life and for the life of mankind."

But maybe is Rose Macaulay who describes better the relation between humanism and religion in Forster: " His humanist, liberal, classical mind welcomes religion as spirit but not as doctrine, not as creed; perhaps it welcomes no creeds of any kind, only the spirit behind them."

Forster wrote about this theme: "Temperamentally, I am an individualist. Professionally I am a writer, and my books emphasize the importance of personal relationships and the private life, for I believe in them."

And Martial Rose said: "Indeed, his greatest achievement might not be the literature he has left us but the friendships he has made- with the great and the insignificant. His belief in personal relations has been even more vividly exemplified in his life than in his writing."

In opinion of Gertrude M. White: "The value of personal relationships, the holiness of the heart’s affections, always important in Forster’s novels, is central to the theme, the characters, and the episodes of A Passage. Error and evil are the inevitable consequences of the failure of love between human beings: of the disastrous personal failure of Adela, and the no less disastrous social and political failure of the English officials and their wives."

And as Forster’s biographer said: "The central preocupation of his life, it was plain to see, was friendship, and he had a rather special attitude towards friendship. He never casually dropped friends, as most people do, out of forgetfulness or through change of circumstance (...) He believed literally, and as more than a sentimental cliché- that the true History of the human race was the history of human affection."

As P. J..M. Scott said: "Forster can bring his characters to life by making them talk- he does so every time- and no method else could so effectually grant them independent existence-existence independent even, as it were, of the opinions and prejudices of the mind which created them."

And as it is expressed by Miriam Allot:

Mr. E.M. Forster is one of the earliest novelists to employ a dialogue which is simpler and more natural than James’s although remaining at the same time allusive and schooled by the artist’s central themes. Mr. Forster’s ear for certain kinds of idiom is unerring: he gets the slightly dated slang used by Aziz in A Passage to India exactly right, and he is equally happy in handing the delightful interchanges between Gino and his Italian friends in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Miss Honeychurch’s comfortable English middle-class fluency in A Room with a View, and the clichés of the insensitive Pembrokes in The Longest Journey.

And as M. Rose said, there is an evolution in A Passage to India: "Certainly the quality of the dialogue of the published edition, within its extraordinary variety of mood, race and situation, is one of the great triumphs of this novel, and marks the peak of Forster’s achievement in this field."

Louise Dauner said:

Forster belongs to that small group of writers- one thinks within the last century of Melville, Hawthorne, D.H. Lawrence and Dostoievsky- whose deepest wisdoms trascend temporal and racial boundaries because their insights derive not so much from the conscious mind as from what Jung calls the Collective Unconscious, that source for creativity which gives rise to a vision of genuine primordial experience common to humanity.

And as it is expressed by Gillian Beer: "A Passage to India is, after all, a book about gaps, fisures, absences, and exclusions; about bridge-parties that don’t bridge, about caves broached by man-made entrances, about absent witnesses who do not witness and who are indeed already dead, about how society -how meaning itself- depends upon exclusion."

About racism Christopher Gillie said:

But for Forster it was an important observation, because he was deeply conscious of himself as English middle class, and of the obstacles which his social stereotype imposed on the freedom of his mind and feelings.

1.-Butler de Foley, Mª I., Relaciones personales en las obras de Edward Morgan Forster y Miguel Delibes, tesis doctoral presentada en la Universidad de Madrid en 1973.

2.-The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Hardmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1970, vol. 7, pág. 247

3.-Sánchez Calvo, Arsenio, Miguel de Unamuno y E.M. Forster: Temática y técnica novelística, Valladolid: secretariado de publicaciones, 1989, pág. 44

4.-Alan Wilde, Art and Order: A Study of E.M. Forster, London, Peter Owen, 1965, pág. 28.

5.- Denis Godfrey, Other Kingdom, London, Oliver and Boyd, 1968, pág. 104.

6.- John S. Martin, E.M. Forster: The Endless Journey, Cambridge University Press, 1977, pág. 27.

7.- Christopher Gillie, Movements in English Literature: 1900-1940, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, págs. 114-115.

8.-Lionel Trilling, E.M. Forster: A Study, London, The Hogarth Press, 1969, págs. 45-46.

9.- P.J.M. Scott, E.M. Forster: Our Permanent Contemporary, London, Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984, pág. 92.

10.- Glen Cavaliero, A Reading of E.M. Forster, London, MacMillan, 1979, pág. 14.

11.-Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E.M. Forster, London, The Hogarth Press, 1970, pág. 298.

12.-Martial Rose, E.M. Forster, London, Evans Brothers, 1970, pág. 124.

13.-Miriam Allot, Novelists on the Novel, London, Routledge & Regan Paul, 1973, pág. 214.

14.-Beer, Gillian, "Negation in A Passage to India", Essays in Criticism, Oxford, 1980, pág. 152.