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

This is the first book-length study of Forster's
posthumously-published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives in
literature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Begun in 1913 and revised over almost fifty years, Maurice became a
defining text in Forster's work and a canonical example of queer fiction. Yet
the critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a 'revelation' of
Forster's homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aesthetic
contexts for this novel.

This collection places Maurice among early twentieth-century
debates about politics, philosophy, religion, gender, Aestheticism and allegory.
Essays explore how the novel interacts with literary predecessors and
contemporaries including John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis and Edward
Carpenter, and how it was shaped by personal relationships such as Forster's
friendship with Florence Barger. They close-read the textual variants of
Forster's manuscripts and examine the novel's genesis and revisions. They consider
the volatility of its reception, analysing how it galvanizes subsequent
generations of writers and artists including Christopher Isherwood, Alan
Hollinghurst, Damon Galgut, James Ivory and twenty-first-century online
fanfiction writers. What emerges from the volume is the complexity of the
novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon.