Aspects of the Novel

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The effort to see through novels, not round them--that is how E. M. Forster describes the driving force behind this book. He discards the weighty 'historical' view with its cumbersome apparatus of 'tendencies', 'influences' and 'periods'. Instead we are to imagine all novelists at work together in a circular room. With this welcome freshness of approach the author of A Passage to India discusses the various ways we can look at a novel. Aspects of the Novel, originally a course of Clark Lectures at Cambridge, is full of E. M. Forster's habitual wit and wisdom. 'I say that I have never met this kind of perspicacity in literary criticism before. I could quote scores of examples of startling excellence' -- Arnold Bennett