Tsung-Han Tsai - Böcker

This book examines the political resonances of E. M. Forster's representations of music, offering readings of canonical and overlooked works. It reveals music's crucial role in his writing and draws attention to a previously unacknowledged eclecticism and complexity in Forster's ideological outlook. Examining unobtrusive musical allusions in a variety of Forster's writings, this book demonstrates how music provided Forster with a means of reflecting on race and epistemology, material culture and colonialism, literary heritage and national character, hero-worship and war, and gender and professionalism. It unveils how Forster's musical representations are mediated through a matrix of ideas and debates of his time, such as those about evolution, empire, Britain's relationship with the Continent, the rise of fascism, and the emergence of musicology as an academic discipline.

This is the first book-length study of Forster’sposthumously-published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives inliterature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Begun in 1913 and revised over almost fifty years, Maurice became adefining text in Forster’s work and a canonical example of queer fiction. Yetthe critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a ‘revelation’ ofForster’s homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aestheticcontexts for this novel. This collection places Maurice among early twentieth-centurydebates about politics, philosophy, religion, gender, Aestheticism and allegory.Essays explore how the novel interacts with literary predecessors andcontemporaries including John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis and EdwardCarpenter, and how it was shaped by personal relationships such as Forster’sfriendship with Florence Barger. They close-read the textual variants ofForster’s manuscripts and examine the novel’s genesis and revisions. They considerthe volatility of its reception, analysing how it galvanizes subsequentgenerations of writers and artists including Christopher Isherwood, AlanHollinghurst, Damon Galgut, James Ivory and twenty-first-century onlinefanfiction writers. What emerges from the volume is the complexity of thenovel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon.