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University Of Chicago Press
release date: 1997-11-24
Listmania |
Product Description
This groundbreaking volume presents a radical revision of gay criticism and focuses on E. M. Forster's place in the emerging field of queer studies.
Many previous critics of Forster downplayed his homosexuality or read Forster naively in terms of gay liberation. This collection situates Forster within the Bloomsbury Group and examines his relations to major figures such as Henry James, Edward Carpenter, and Virginia Woolf. Particular attention is paid to Forster's several accounts of India and their troubled relation to the British colonial enterprise. Analyzing a wide range of Forster's work, the authors examine material from Forster's undergraduate writings to stories written more than a half-century later.
A landmark book for the study of gender in literature, Queer Forster brings the terms "queer" and "gay" into conversation, opening up a dialogue on wider dimensions of theory and allowing a major revaluation of modernist inventions of sexual identity.
Many previous critics of Forster downplayed his homosexuality or read Forster naively in terms of gay liberation. This collection situates Forster within the Bloomsbury Group and examines his relations to major figures such as Henry James, Edward Carpenter, and Virginia Woolf. Particular attention is paid to Forster's several accounts of India and their troubled relation to the British colonial enterprise. Analyzing a wide range of Forster's work, the authors examine material from Forster's undergraduate writings to stories written more than a half-century later.
A landmark book for the study of gender in literature, Queer Forster brings the terms "queer" and "gay" into conversation, opening up a dialogue on wider dimensions of theory and allowing a major revaluation of modernist inventions of sexual identity.
Amazon.com Review
It is no longer a secret that famed British novelist E. M. Forster was a homosexual (the posthumous publication of his gay-themed novel Maurice in 1971 made that perfectly clear), but academic criticism has been late in catching up with this news. Even when critics acknowledge Forster's sexuality they rarely discuss its relationship to his fiction. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford's Queer Forster collects 13 essays that analyze the writer's work--including The Longest Journey and his essays on censorship, India, and British politics--in the context of his sexuality and the social and political issues of his time. Forster's relationship to the Bloomsbury Group, many of whom were openly gay as opposed to Forster's more quite life, is discussed at length. More traditionally minded academics complain that this biographical criticism "limits" an understanding of a writer's work, but Queer Forster contains some of the most provocative and insightful contemporary writing on modern British literature.