E.M. Forster and Music

E. M. Forster and Music illustrates music's vital role in Forster's positioning of his own ideology, awakening the ideological potency in the allusive force of Forster's representations of music and revealing the political significance of his engagement with music. It shifts criticism's attention from the 'musicality' of Forster's prose to his awareness of the contentious relationship between music and politics. Examining unobtrusive, often overlooked, musical allusions in a variety of Forster's writings, this book demonstrates how music provided Forster with a means of reflecting on race and epistemology, material culture and colonialism, literary heritage and national character, hero-worship and war, and gender and professionalism. It unveils how Forster's musical representations are mediated through a matrix of ideas and debates of his time, such as those about evolution, empire, Britain's relationship with the Continent, the rise of fascism, and the emergence of musicology as an academic discipline.