Queer Forster

by Robert K. Martin and George Piggford

Published 24 November 1997
This volume presents a radical revision of gay criticism and focuses on E.M. Forster's place in the emerging field of queer studies. This collection situates Forster within the Bloomsbury Group, and examines his relations with major figures such as Henry James, Edward Carpenter and Virginia Woolf. Particular attention is paid to Forster's several accounts of India and their troubled relation to the British colonial enterprise. Analyzing a wide range of Forster's work, the authors examine material from Forster's undergraduate writings to stories written more than a half-century later. A study of gender in literature, this book brings the terms "queer" and "gay" into conversation, opening up a dialogue on wider dimensions of theory and allowing a revaluation of modernist inventions of sexual identity.