The Achievement of E. M. Forster

A study of Forster's work which concentrates on the roots of his literary thinking in earlier English Romanticism.

Description

The book treats Forster's work in the early short stories, A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, Howards End and A Passage to India. It then discusses the changes in Forster's thinking after the First World War and the lasting qualities of Forster's work amidst decaying social cohesion and the loss of imaginative vision.

About the author

Professor John Bernard Beer, M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D., FBA, Coleridge scholar, Emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse, and former Research Fellow of St John’s College FBA (31 March 1926 – 10 December 2017) was a critic of British literature. . Best known as a scholar and critic of Romanticism – especially William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth – he was also published on E. M. Forster. John was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994. Beer served in the Royal Air Force from 1946 to 1948, a junior research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, from 1955 to 1958 and between 1958 and 1964 he was assistant lecturer and then lecturer at the University of Manchester. From 1964 until his retirement in 1993, he was successively lecturer, reader (1978) and professor (1987) of English literature at the University of Cambridge. His other roles included; President of the Charles Lamb Society from 1989 until 2002, Leverhulme emeritus fellow in 1995–1996. and Stanton lecturer in the philosophy of religion in the University of Cambridge in 2006. 

Notable works

Coleridge, the Visionary, Chatto & Windus, 1959; Humanities E-Books LLP, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84760-044-8 The Achievement of E. M. Forster, Chatto & Windus, 1962; Humanities E-Books LLP, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84760-003-5 Blake's humanism, Manchester University Press/Barnes & Noble, 1968; Humanities E-Books LLP, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84760-000-4 Wordsworth and the human heart, 1978. ISBN 978-0-231-04646-6 Questioning Romanticism, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8018-5052-5 Post-Romantic Consciousness: Dickens to Plath, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ISBN 1-4039-0518-5 William Blake: a Literary Life, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 978-1-4039-3954-8 Blake's Visionary Universe, Manchester University Press/Barnes & Noble, 1969. ISBN 0-7190-0390-3 Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, Macmillan, 1977. ISBN 0-333-21312-2