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A review by reverie_and_books
Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
This is a collection of lecture notes for a course he gave at Cambridge University in 1927. It spans the topics Story, People, Plot, Fantasy, Prophecy, Patterns, and Rhythm of novels. In that way this is a meta-book on the art of writing novels, the connections between People and Plot, the differences between scholars, pseudo-scholars and critics, and much more.
“The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”
Forster acknowledges personal taste and relations to a novel before putting this important but subjective matter aside. With reference to many classic authors like Melville, Dickens, E. Brontë and Austen, but also the (to him) superior novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, he give examples in regards to the topics he discusses.
This collection might be especially fun if you’ve read a few classic novels and want to dissect the matter they are made of.
“The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”
Forster acknowledges personal taste and relations to a novel before putting this important but subjective matter aside. With reference to many classic authors like Melville, Dickens, E. Brontë and Austen, but also the (to him) superior novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, he give examples in regards to the topics he discusses.
This collection might be especially fun if you’ve read a few classic novels and want to dissect the matter they are made of.