E. M. Forster's Howards End: Fiction as history (Text and context) - Hardcover

Peter Widdowson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0856210676 ISBN 13: 9780856210679

Publisher: Sussex University Press, 1977

Synopsis

Howards End, published in 1910, is deeply revealing of social and cultural processes which were intensified and transformed by the First World War. Forster's theme is the threat to liberal values from the hostile tendencies of modern life. Against the brutalising insensibility of urban and industrial England he opposed traditional rural England embodied in Howards End.Peter Widdowson consider the ambiguities and inconsistencies of Forster's vision which paradoxically contribute to the novel's success as a work of art. He shows how the form and structure of the novel - superficially a novel in the 19th century realist tradition - enact the insecurities and ambivalence of liberal ideology. He concludes that Howards End is not simply Forster's conscious account of the war between liberal-humanist culture and the new brutalism but also a part of that war.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sussex University Press
• Publication date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0856210676
• ISBN 13: 9780856210679
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 124