Only Connect: E. M. Forster’s Legacies in British Fiction (Critical Perspectives on English and American Literature, Communication and Culture)

Since Forster’s death in 1970, many British novelists and film directors have acknowledged and even claimed the influence of the novelist of the English soul (in Woolf’s terms) and of a renewed faith in both human relationships and a quintessentially British liberal-humanism. After the ethical turn at the end of the twentieth century, British literature today seems to go back even more drastically to the figure of the individual human being, and to turn the narrative space into some laboratory of a new form of empowerment of the other’s political autonomy. It is in this context that the references to Forster are more and more frequent, both in British fiction and in academia. This book does not only aim at spotting and theorising this return to Forster today. Rather we endeavour to trace its genealogy and shed light on the successive modes of the legacy, from Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) onwards, to the novelisation of Forster himself by Damon Galgut. How can the principle of connection, of correspondences and echoes, which informed Forster’s private life and approach to writing so much, equally characterise the aesthetic and political influence of his œuvre? Cover Contents Introduction: Forster and After (Elsa Cavalié and Laurent Mellet) Part I. New perspectives on Forster: personal legacies Civilization and Natural Depravity: On Forster, Melville, Lawrence, and Britten (Jeremy Tambling) Reconstructing Knowledge in A Passage to India (Tim Mackin) ‘Well, my England is E. M.’: Christopher Isherwood and E. M. Forster’s Alliance through their Correspondence (Aude Haffen) The Issues of Liberal Humanism and the Condition of England from E. M. Forster to Angus Wilson (Jean-Christophe Murat) Part II: Ethical legacies: from Forster to contemporary British fiction He Cared: Forster, McEwan, and the Ethics of Attentiveness (Jean-Michel Ganteau) Tracing ‘the Heart’s Imagination’ in Contemporary British Fiction (Marie Laniel) The Subject/Object Commodity: From Forster’s Howards End to Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Yi-Chuang E. Lin) ‘Her Way of Walking’: Explorations of Nature and the Unseen in Forster’s Howards End and Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (Christina Root) E. M. Forster’s Place in the Long Discourse of Friendship (Maaz Bin Bilal) Part III: Aesthetic legacies: ‘Only connect’? ‘Common Garden Variety’ or ‘Rare Bird’: The Persistence of E. M. Forster’s Singular Song (Catherine Lanone) In Timeless Company: E. M. Forster and J. M. Coetzee (N. Cyril Fischer) Walking, Strolling and Trailing: Ivory’s Adaptation of Movement in Forster’s Howards End (Nour Dakkak) ‘The Muddling of the Arts’: Modernist Rites and Rhythms in Forster, Woolf and McEwan (Susan Reid) E. M. Forster and the Obsession for Rhythm: Rewriting ‘The Story of a Panic’ with ‘The Life to Come’ (Julie Chevaux) Part IV: Gay legacies: ‘Only disconnect’? The Postcolonial Queer and the Legacies of Colonial Homoeroticism: Of Queer Lenses and Phenomenology in E. M. Forster, David Lean and Hanif Kureishi (Alberto Fernandez Carbajal) Coupling: the ‘Lost Form’ of 20th-Century Literature? – Or Only Disconnect (Nicolas Pierre Boileau) Creative Criticism/Critical Creation: E. M. Forster and Alan Hollinghurst (Xavier Giudicelli) Forster’s Pastoral Legacy in Trauma Poetics: The Melancholic Neo-Pastoral in Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star (José Mari Yebra) Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014) in Context (Celia Cruz-Rus) Notes on Contributors This book questions the artistic, aesthetic, political and ethical legacy of E. M. Forster’s novels. It covers Forster’s literary, cinematic and musical legacies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and deal with many authors, such as Melville, Isherwood, Hollinghurst and Kureishi.