Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism


Howards End, E. M. Forster | Burkhard Niederhoff (essay date 1994)

Burkhard Niederhoff (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Niederhoff, Burkhard. “E. M. Forster and the Supersession of Plot by Leitmotif: A Reading of Aspects of the Novel and Howards End.Anglia 112, no. 3-4 (1994): 341-63.

[In the following essay, Niederhoff examines similarities between Forster's discussion of novels in Aspects of the Novel and Howards End.]

In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster writes about Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, “The book is chaotic, ill-constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.”1 To illustrate what he means by “rhythms”, Forster mentions a leitmotif well known to the readers of the Recherche. “There are several examples […], but the most important, from the binding point of view, is his use of the ‘little phrase’ in the music of...

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