E.M. Forster was one
of Britain’s
best-selling literary authors a century ago, and is known nowadays to art house
lovers from film adaptations of Howards
End, A Passage to India and Maurice. In his perceptive and critical
analysis, Frank Kermode writes that Forster “wanted to write books that would
please creative people but be bought by all the others.” In other words, he was
a fellow traveler of the avant-garde who wanted to remain accessible to the
general public. Although identifying the narrowness of Forster’s class bias,
Kermode, one of the most engaging and witty of contemporary literary critics,
approves of the novelist’s distaste for the tendencies that would coalesce into
late-20th-century cultural studies—especially the privileging of literary
theory over the pleasure to be found in literature itself.
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