Aspects of the Novel

The book includes a course of lectures (the annual Clark Lectures) which were delivered by E.M. Forster under the auspices of Trinity College, Cambridge in the spring of 1927. The driving force behind this book, according to the author, is the effort to see through novels and not round them. He discards the weighty ‘historical’ view with its cumbersome apparatus of ‘tendencies’, ‘influences’ and ‘periods’ and instead imagines all novelists at work together in a circular room.