Howards End, E. M. Forster - Stuart Sillars (essay date 1999)
Stuart Sillars (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Sillars, Stuart. “Howards End and the Dislocation of Narrative.” In Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910-1920, pp. 31-61. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999.
[In the following essay, Sillars examines Forster's allusions in Howards End to other texts of the Edwardian period in England to gain an understanding of the novel's “duality.”]
In many ways, Forster's Howards End is the central text of the Edwardian years. I mean this not in the sense that it demonstrates values that are fundamental to the period—even though, as I shall later show, it addresses many of the age's main concerns—but rather in the sense that it demonstrates that duality of assertion and retreat, continuation and refusal, that I have claimed as the basic mode of so much writing of the time.
To call the structural principle at the heart of the novel a kind of irony would...
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