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Aspects of the Novel

e.m. forster oliver stallybrass frank kermode

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From the Back Cover
The wit and lively, informed originality Forster employs in his study of the novel has made this book a classic. Deliberately avoiding the chronological development approach of what he classifies "pseudoscholarship," the author freely examines aspects all English-language novels have in common: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. Forster's delightful treatment gives the reader a profound appreciation for both the novel and the author's own formidable talents.

"We discover under Forster's casual and wittily acute guidance, many things about the literary magic which transmutes the dull stuff of He-said and She-said into characters, stories, and intimations of truth." -- Jacques Barzun, Harper's Magazine

Mr. Forster's volume is more than a discussion of a literary form, it is a discussion of experience, of life, an admirable and delightful reflection of a mind that has recognized its own affinity with Erasmus and Montaigne. -- Theodore Spencer, New York Times Book Review

Amazon. com Review
There are all kinds of books out there purporting to explain that odd phenomenon the novel. Sometimes it's hard to know whom they're are for, exactly. Enthusiastic readers? Fellow academics? Would-be writers? Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster's 1927 treatise on the "fictitious prose work over 50,000 words" is, it turns out, for anyone with the faintest interest in how fiction is made. Open at random, and find your attention utterly sandbagged.

Forster's book is not really a book at all; rather, it's a collection of lectures delivered at Cambridge University on subjects as parboiled as "People," "The Plot," and "The Story." It has an unpretentious verbal immediacy thanks to its spoken origin and is written in the key of Apologetic Mumble: "Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad." Such gentle provocations litter these pages. How can you not read on? Forster's critical writing is so ridiculously plainspoken, so happily commonsensical, that we often forget to be intimidated by the rhetorical landscapes he so ably leads us through. As he himself points out in the introductory note, "Since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows."

Forster's brand of humanism has fallen from fashion in literary studies, yet it endures in fiction itself. Readers still love this author, even if they come to him by way of the multiplex. The durability of his work is, of course, the greatest raison d'être this book could have. It should have been titled How to Write Novels People Will Still Read in a Hundred Years. -- Claire Dederer

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1927

This edition

Format
204 pages, Paperback
Published
September 1, 2005 by Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN
9780141441696
ASIN
0141441690
Language
English

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About the author

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e.m. forster

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Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".

He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. He is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised for his attachment to mysticism. His other works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Maurice (1971), his posthumously published novel which tells of the coming of age of an explicitly gay male character.

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ZerosKnightmare
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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"Do not be so ramshackly"

This is advice Margaret Schlegel gave her sister. And I was reminded of this because Forster uses the word enough times that it really feels like it's him speaking, and because even though this series of lectures is insightful enough that it can't possibly be for the purpose of correcting me, it felt like I might have been going about reading novels in a ramshackly way if I didn't quite understand what they were about.
Characters in novels are more real than the people you know. Imagine all the important writers around a table to start understanding that things don't change. Moby Dick is prophetic, expansive, it opens. Adam Bede shows the agnostic humanist George Eliot to be a preacher. So interesting all the way through, although, the person that wrote notes in the margins wouldn't agree. I can't say when the enthusiastic dashed underlines stopped because they annoyed me so much I only noticed when they were there bothering me, but at least one read lost interest before the end.
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hatsujc
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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A collection of lectures full of Forster's musings about writing. Rambling, unfocused, and forgettable.

But a quote about character building struck me as funny:
"The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They 'run away,' they 'get out of hand': they are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay."
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ReginaPatricia
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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3.5 out of 5
(I feel that Goodreads should have a 10 star rating system)

This book is a series of lectures delivered in 1927 at the Cambridge, with 9 chapters and obviously an academic book discussing the elements of any complete English novel.
Although this was written almost a hundred years ago, the ideas are still very fresh.
Forster mainly analyzed the novels written in the previous 200 years preceding his time, the era of literary modernism. Compared to the history of epic and drama, novel was (and is) still very new back then. Perhaps that was his reason to set a vantage-point for what a novel should have/ be/ look like. He defined novel as any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words for the purposes of his lectures; he discussed the seven different 'aspects' of the novel:
1. The Story
2. People (characters)
3. The Plot
4. Fantasy
5. Prophecy
6. Pattern and
7. Rhythm
Finally he concluded by saying that we don't need to worry about the past or future of the novel, or how it's nature might change, since it is independent of time or history and depends solely on the human nature. If human nature alters, only then there will be alterations in the aspects of the novel.

This is an interesting book which I will recommended to read if someone wants to write or understand English novels better.
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HauntedEscapes
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel had the potential to make some very important and interesting points about how we categorise and understand the novel. In fairness, it contains very simple and helpful definitions of plot and story. Forster tells us that the two are distinguished by causality.
Unfortunately, the man is a total prick. The very personal, informal style of the guide reveals how hugely biased, defensive and uninformed Forster is. He believes only the intelligent with good memories can appreciate novels, movie-goers are no better than cavemen, and he chides the inquisitive – a reader should not ask questions of their novelist, simply read and brood.
Forster asks us in his introduction to imagine every novelist working in a single circular room at the same time, removing their works of any context, influence and chronology. In designing this room, he refuses to believe that social, medical, political or technological advances have in any way impacted the novel. He lost me fully on page 27 with the words: ‘As women bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too. Quite wrong.’ I refuse to believe that all the world’s novels could be written without any knowledge of one another. Nothing exists in a vacuum. I had borrowed my copy from the library, and so will finish up with a quotation from another student scrawled in the margins. ‘NO! STICK IT UP YOUR ARSE.’
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washingpowderbit
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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This is the book version of a series of lectures Forster gave at Cambridge the year my grandmother was born, i.e 1927. I found it interesting, and Forster's casual style (since he was speaking rather than writing) and self-awareness of the slipperiness of the subject causing his inability to really grasp it in a masterful way made it a refreshing read despite the 90 years between him saying these things and me reading them.

That said, I think it was a bit muddled and I think sometimes he assumed more than he should've. While there was already plenty of criticism on the art of novels then, it was nothing like today in the copious amount of opinion we have on the subject and the ease of perusing it all by Google or ebook, and so Forster struck out on his own and through the jungle of darkness sought to give us his ideas for what 'aspects' to consider constitute novels. Despite its flaws, I would consider it a valiant and successful effort more or less.

It is illuminating in parts and bogged down in others. Sometimes he tries too hard to define and teach us something that he doesn't really (and self-admittedly) fully grasp either and the effect is of rousing the intellect yet wishing to just be past it as it feels like you're stuck in quicksand with someone lecturing you from the side who has some idea of how to get out but can't really say how they got out themselves, just that they did and it is somehow possible.

Am I being too harsh? Perhaps. The book is short, I did feel that I learned a few things and if one is interested in literary criticism and the novel as art, or in writing fiction, then this is worth taking a look at. Beware though, if you are leery of spoilers, that this book will spoil quite a few classics for you in its dissection of various aspects, if you haven't read them yet.
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StellarAbyss
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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did I actually finish all of this? no. (*but I did read some chapters!)
am I gonna act like I did to help out my Goodreads challenge? yes
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Dnny99
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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دیگه واقعا حوصله خوندن متن‌های قلنبه سلنبه رو ندارم.. نکات جالبی داشت برام ولی کاش ساده‌تر و روانتر ترجمه می‌شد.
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AverageOrNotSo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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My favorite take away from this is that people in books don't have to eat. They can exist, Forster says, without food. Following this logic, unlike actors on a film set, characters shouldn't need catering. So, when they sit down at a table, I take note. Something important is about to happen. Try to picture The Glass Menagerie without those dinner scenes. Meals are the last bastion of the mother's control. Tables, round as worlds, are under her rule. She presides over them into a collision course.

Forster's point feeds more for me. What about sleep? Characters don't need it like you and I do. Yet, where would A Christmas Carol be if Scrooge hadn't gone to bed? Where, for that matter, would most ghost stories be? Forster nourishes my reading with this little book.

Though these were lectures at Cambridge, they come across in clear language not to mystify. Even if you don't know some of the novels he mentions, it won't matter. There is still so much to get from these pages for readers or writers or both. The author does, in many ways, just state the obvious. I admire that in someone who dares. Common sense is here. And a century later, the points he makes still have weight.
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