Forster Criticism

ELT 36 : 1 1993 ing, and page design: all have been imagined collectively together." For McGann, this move to integrate text and its material vehicle makes Morris a significant precursor of Modernism. It is also, of course, intrinsic to Morris's effort to include all aspects of manufacture and use in his concept of art—a desire that led him inescapably to politics. The four essays remind us in various ways that, even when PreRaphaelite art seems most distinctly a product of the nineteenth century , it faces issues we are accustomed to believe uniquely our own. They are not just about Pre-Raphaelitism; they are about the role of the arts in the culture we have enjoyed—or struggled with—for the past 150 years. Frederick Kirchhoff Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne Förster Criticism Claude J. Summers. E. M. Forster: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland, 1991. xviii + 405pp. $48.00 AFTER FORSTER'S DEATH IN 1970 his reputation fell into a predictable if not wholly inevitable decline, abetted to some extent by the publication of some minor and unfinished work not intended for publication. This downward trend appears recently to have bottomed out as attention to his writing continues. And the popularization of his fiction in no less than five films of his six novels has brought him to a large audience outside the classroom and the academy. Claude J. Summers's guide to criticism, while charting landmarks in the earlier academic consideration of Forster's work, focuses mainly on criticism published since the mid-1970s, picking up where Frederick McDowell's massive E. M. Forster: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him (1976) left off and extending, with reasonable completeness , through 1988. (Its terminal date is autumn 1990.) As Summers acknowledges, "Forster" and Forster studies have considerably altered since McDowell's volume appeared. The years accounted for here witnessed the publication of a number of major scholarly endeavors, including the ambitious Abinger Edition, P. N. Furbank's authorized biography, the revision of B. J. Kirkpatrick's primary bibliography, and two volumes of selected letters. The concurrent rediscovery of Bloomsbury inspired further explorations of Forster in context, and the centenary commemorations of 1979 urged on assessments of his achievement. With the passage of time, a guide to this large body of new 72 BOOK REVIEWS material has become increasingly necessary, and the scholar may confidently and with pleasure turn to Summers for reliable orientation, direction, and illumination. The volume is divided topically into two main sections: a primary bibliography offers summary information on the major works and catalogues scholarly editions as well as letters and documents. A detailed secondary bibliography listing reference sources, biographical materials , and general studies precedes sections detailing criticism of the individual novels, and the short fiction and non-fiction. The guide closes with three indexes—to authors, subjects, and Forster's works—and is cross-referenced throughout. Unlike McDowell, who aimed at comprehensiveness, Summers opts to survey work that is in some wise significant and also accessible in a well-stocked academic research library. The only cavil one might make about the organization is the inclusion of some film reviews (on the grounds that they substantively focused on the novel) in the section devoted to A Passage to India. An appendix would have adequately handled articles occasioned by that film and might usefully have included some reviews of the others for however little these might contribute to readings of the novels, they document Forster's popular reception. Summers's annotations to the entries, the "heart of the bibliography," are inevitably marked as he forthrightly acknowledges by his own reading of Forster and his critics which, as his E. M. Forster (1983) and other work has shown, is sensitively informed, subtle, and balanced. The only blind spot occurs in his assessments of the major scholarly projects. The textual unreliability of the Abinger Edition volumes up to A Passage to India, because of a defective choice of copy-texts and the editorial alteration of Forster's accidentals, is insufficiently glossed. It is equally surprising to find Lago and Furbank's Selected Letters (1983-85) characterized as "superbly edited and judiciously selected." A comprehensive...