Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster's 'Maurice'

This is the first book-length study of Forster’sposthumously-published novel.

Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives inliterature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Begun in 1913 and revised over almost fifty years, Maurice became adefining text in Forster’s work and a canonical example of queer fiction.

Yetthe critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a ‘revelation’ ofForster’s homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aestheticcontexts for this novel.

This collection places Maurice among early twentieth-centurydebates about politics, philosophy, religion, gender, Aestheticism and allegory. Essays explore how the novel interacts with literary predecessors andcontemporaries including John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis and EdwardCarpenter, and how it was shaped by personal relationships such as Forster’sfriendship with Florence Barger.

They close-read the textual variants ofForster’s manuscripts and examine the novel’s genesis and revisions.

They considerthe volatility of its reception, analysing how it galvanizes subsequentgenerations of writers and artists including Christopher Isherwood, AlanHollinghurst, Damon Galgut, James Ivory and twenty-first-century onlinefanfiction writers.

What emerges from the volume is the complexity of thenovel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon.