Forster & Formalism

ELT 39:4 1996 times in which they were created, one might expect a more chronological presentation of material. Some readers may have problems with the highly personal nature of the work, to her confessional asides, and to her advocacy of particular literary works and political stances. Indeed, some might even argue that a literary and cultural critic has very little business discussing politics at all and that her comments on the Reagan -Bush years are self-indulgent at best. Certainly Auerbach is at least open and consistent about her idiosyncrasies, and statements such as "I loved vampires before I hated Republicans" lay bare her ideological biases. These biases are also consistent with her open admiration for both the vampires in nineteenth-century Romantic literature and the free vampires of the 1970s, a "soaring alternative to patriarchal families ." Part of my enthusiasm for Our Vampires, Ourselves may stem from the fact that I share many of Auerbach's preferences (though I confess to like Stoker's Dracula more than she seems to). My main reason, however, for recommending Our Vampires, Ourselves is that it will challenge readers to rethink both the vampire in literature and other media and the times in which we live. Carol A. Senf Georgia Institute of Technology Förster & Formalism Audrey A. P. Lavin. Aspects of the Novelist: E. M. Forster's Pattern and Rhythm. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. xii + 155 pp. $35.95 THE TITLE of this study gives one immediate pause. Is this to be yet another formalist analysis of Forster's novels, reverently choosing its tools from Forster's box of ideas in Aspects of the Novel? Have not "pattern" and "rhythm" received exhaustive (and early) treatment in E. K. Brown's Rhythm in the Novel (1950), James McConkey's The Novels of E. M. Forster (1957), and George H. Thomson's The Fiction of E. M. Forster (1967)? What is there new to say about the meanings of Baedeker or Harriet's inlaid box in Where Angels Fear to Tread, or about the wych elm in Howards End? Will the author provide us with fresh insights into Forster's own categories of fixed and expanding images, easy and difficult rhythms? Are we, once more, to be persuaded of the importance of musical analogies—the movements of the sonata and the symphony— to an understanding of Forster's formal intentions and effects? Are we, yet again, to admire Forster's leit-motifs and, with his encouragement, 494 BOOK REVIEWS or at his bidding, go beyond them to the transcendental truths of "prophecy"? The apprehensions implied by the foregoing, obviously rhetorical, questions are not eased by a reading of the study. Aspects of the Novelist employs a thoroughly outdated methodology to arrive at results too predictable for even the most nostalgic of formal humanists to admire. Without an adequate index or an adequate list of secondary works consulted, it fails to meet the scholarly expectations aroused by its presence in Peter Lang's American University Studies, of which it is Volume 151 of Series IV, English Language and Literature. The introduction is an attempt to describe the study's approach and stake out its originality, but the engagement with existing criticism is idiosyncratic and slight. Minor critics of Forster like Rose Macaulay and Lionel Stevenson provide a point of departure, while a major critic like Trilling is dismissed in a phrase as one who read Forster "as a humanist writer of Hawthornian romances" (1). No mention is made of more recent critics, such as Barbara Rosecrance and Alan Wilde, who have addressed —and questioned—the role of form in Forster's novels. Dr. Lavin assumes that critics have reached a consensus about Forster's vision and, moreover, that this vision is a "humane, liberal vision that we readers immediately know is correct" (2). She adds that "there is no real body of negative criticism being published today" (2), a claim that will surprise readers aware of Peter Widdowson's critique of Forster's liberal humanism, or of feminist criticism of Forster's misogyny in The Longest Journey and Maurice, or of the division between critics like Claude Summers, who consider Maurice the first...