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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.3
EAN num: 9780156091800
ISBN number: 0156091801
Label: Harvest Books
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: September 14, 1956
Publishing house: Harvest Books
Sale Popularity Level: 39083
Studio: Harvest Books
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Forster’s lively, informed originality and wit have made this book a classic. Avoiding the chronological approach of what he calls “pseudoscholarship,” he freely examines aspects all English-language novels have in common: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. Index.
Amazon.com Review:
There are all kinds of books out there purporting to explain that odd phenomenon the novel. Sometimes it's hard to know whom they're are for, exactly. Enthusiastic readers? Fellow academics? Would-be writers? Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster's 1927 treatise on the 'fictitious prose work over 50,000 words' is, it turns out, for anyone with the faintest interest in how fiction is made. Open at random, and find your attention utterly sandbagged.
Forster's book is not really a book at all; rather, it's a collection of lectures delivered at Cambridge University on subjects as parboiled as 'People,' 'The Plot,' and 'The Story.' It has an unpretentious verbal immediacy thanks to its spoken origin and is written in the key of Aplogetic Mumble: 'Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad.' Such gentle provocations litter these pages. How can you not read on? Forster's critical writing is so ridiculously plainspoken, so happily commonsensical, that we often forget to be intimidated by the rhetorical landscapes he so ably leads us through. As he himself points out in the introductory note, 'Since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows.'
And Forster does paddle into some unlikely eddies here. For instance, he seems none too gung ho about love in the novel: 'And lastly, love. I am using this celebrated word in its widest and dullest sense. Let me be very dry and brief about sex in the very first place.' He really means in the very first place. Like the narrator of a '50s hygiene film, Forster continues, dry and brief as anything, 'Some years after a human being is born, certain changes occur in it...' One feels here the same-sexer having the last laugh, heartily.
Forster's brand of humanism has fallen from fashion in literary studies, yet it endures in fiction itself. Readers still love this author, even if they come to him by way of the multiplex. The durability of his work is, of course, the greatest raison d'être this book could have. It should have been titled How to Write Novels People Will Still Read in a Hundred Years. --Claire Dederer
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Rated by buyers 
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The book which started as a series of lectures grew to become one of landmarks in history of literary criticism. Over eighty years after its original publication its value has not diminished. Quite on the contrary, Forster's lucid and rational approach to literature seem to become even more valuable with the publication of almost every book on literary criticism largely regardless of their authors theoretical agendas.
A quarter of a century after the novel was recognised as literature (before Henry James' "The Art of Fiction" only poetry and drama deserved the name) and in the peak period of the modernism (this book was written between the publications of "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake") Forster presented his personal view of fiction in a quiet and unassuming but clear and rational way. The resulting book is fairly unrevolutionary for the period of turmoil and change but it has stood the test of time at least as well as the modern experiments.
"Aspects of the Novel" is one of the books which keep the readers repeating to themselves: "But I know this!" Yes, you do. But it was E. M. Forster who said it first.
Rated by buyers -
E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel is a series of lectures given in Trinity College, Cambridge, in the spring of 1927. It reminds me of the essays read by Virginia Woolf to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October, 1928, published as the acclaimed A Room of One's Own. Similar period and both literature critics. Forster divides novels into several aspects: the story, people, the plot, fantasy, prophecy, and pattern and rhythm.
Forster is sometimes insightful but other times tedious and had the marks of the time. For example, he talks about how some characters are flat and some are round. All Dickens characters are flat, and most Austen characters are round. He says,
"The characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens. They combine so well in a conversation, and draw one another out without seeming to do so, and never perform. Unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, she never stooped to caricature, etc. Her characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate. All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily."
Rated by buyers 
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Sometimes one reads a book and it opens up the brain and heart in such a way that one views the world differently thereafter. This is such a book. You will never again read a novel and think about the book in front of you or how it was written in quite the same way. There is nothing else like it.
Delving into this book was part of a quest over the past year to read books on writing by writers. The books did not address HOW to write a novel other than tangentially. Although there are a plethora of dubious choices along those lines, I stayed away from them. The books that I searched out were books on the process of writing, the very lonely experience of the writer in creating fiction.
Several of the books were fogettable. A surprising number of them were memorable, including Mystery & Manners by Flannery O'Connor, On Writing by Stephen King, and anything by Margaret Atwood.
Of all of the books that I read, this one was the best by far. It covered not only the process of writing but also provided a structure for discussing and understanding the novel art form.
As a result, I highly recommend this book for book clubs. When presenting this book recently to my book club of 14+ years as my pick, there was a collective groan. Upon finishing the book, we all thought that it was one of the best of the 125+ books that we had read. It gave us a missing structure and tools for moving discussions and disagreements forward. Several times over the years, one or more of us have disagreed over some book selection or an aspect of it, but the discusion would stall for lack of a way to bridge the various viewpoints. For the very first time, we were able to go back through those arguments in a new light using the tools presented in the book. It was very enlightening.
The books's title tacitly promises dry intellectual discourse, but the text reads off the page as fresh as it certainly did when it was originally presented by Forster as a series of guest lectures at Cambridge.
Highly recommended reading.
Rated by buyers 
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I've tried for the fourth time to read this book. For the fourth time, I had to give up half-way. This book is just too dense for my simple mind.
I am sure that it contains more substance than most books on writing (hence, the generous two stars), but the packaging and, maybe, relevance compelled me, once more, to use the time I would on it to some other book more suitable for my Philistine tastes.
Rated by buyers -
I will read this again and again. It's loaded, packed, stuffed with fabulous writerly advice.
Sandra Glahn, Lethal Harvest
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