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Katherine Isobel Baxter, David Medalie, E. M. Forster's Modernism. Pp. ix + 213. Basingstoke, London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. £50.00 (ISBN 0 333 98782 9)., Notes and Queries, Volume 53, Issue 1, March 2006, Pages 127–128, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjj179
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Extract
DAVID MEDALIE's stated intention, in E. M. Forster's Modernism, is to resituate Forster's œuvre within a modernist context and, in doing so, to revise ‘our understanding of modernism’ more generally. This may seem a grand claim, and the reader looking for iconoclasm and radical re-readings will be disappointed. And yet, in a quiet way, Medalie provides useful revisions to currents of thought in Forster studies; moreover, he adds his voice to a growing number who seek to ‘expand and enrich’ critical definitions of modernism to include a broader spectrum of writers and artists working at the opening of the twentieth-century.
It is possible to argue that rather than expanding modernism to include authors such as Forster the critic should demonstrate the heterodoxy of early twentieth-century literature, of which modernism was a noisy yet small part. However, Medalie makes a good case for reappraising Forster's work in modernist terms. To do this he devotes considerable time to exploring the ways in which Forster corresponds with, and differs from, his contemporaries in theories of ethics and aesthetics. The opening chapter compares and contrasts Forster's representations of liberal-humanism in Howard's End and A Passage to India, with the liberal-humanist expositions of Masterman, Hobhouse, and Hobson. Medalie argues that Forster's work indicates an increasing suspicion of liberal-humanism's ‘good intentions’, and that this ambivalence engenders an essentially modernist creative dialectic in the fiction.
