Queer Forster Format: Paperback

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.

Designed for a relatively sophisticated academic audience, this work presents a collection of critical readings of E.M. Forster's work, focusing on his role as a demystifier "of relations and identities that a hegemony of the normative world would rather keep unexamined." In this sense, Forster is seen as much more than simply a "gay" writer. Indeed, another intent of the collection is to explore the concept of "queer" as opposed to "gay" theory. Certainly, Forster's sexuality had an important impact on his writing, but more significantly, his outsider status led him to explore more broadly the concept of "difference" and the ways in which the "normal" reacts to this difference. Various contributors examine the Nietzschean and Wagnerian undertones in his work; his place on the periphery of Bloomsbury; the influence of Edward Carpenter, Virginia Woolf, and others; his rejection of Platonism; and how India provided an apt setting in which to explore "queerness." While some of the writing is arcane, the work as a whole offers an interesting and useful perspective on one of the more important figures in 20th-century English literature. For scholarly literature collections.?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
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