Section 1 Summary and Analysis

Written by one of the most well respected British novelists and essayists of the early 20th Century, this book is a critical analysis of the novel and its various elements. The book's content was originally presented in 1927 as a series of lectures at Trinity College at Cambridge University in England, and is published here as a series of essays. The technical components of the novel (story, plot, character, and pattern) receive the majority of Forster's attention but, in that context, he also explores the novel's more emotional and spiritual elements. His core theme relates to the creative tension between freedom and form, between structure and passion.

"Introductory" Forster begins his first lecture with a tribute to William George Clark, a writer and scholar whose legacy to his alma mater, Trinity College (Cambridge, England) established and defined the series of lectures Forster...