A writer of fiction, literary criticism, travel narratives and libretti, E M Forster is best known for his beautifully-structured novels which held a mirror up to the English class system. This fascinating collection of diaries, travel journals and itineraries brings together all unpublished material Forster wrote which can be classed as ‘memoir’.

A writer of fiction, literary criticism, travel narratives and libretti, E M Forster is best known for his beautifully-structured novels which held a mirror up to the English class system. This fascinating collection of diaries, travel journals and itineraries brings together all unpublished material Forster wrote which can be classed as ‘memoir’.

A writer of fiction, literary criticism, travel narratives and libretti, E M Forster is best known for his beautifully-structured novels which held a mirror up to the English class system. This fascinating collection of diaries, travel journals and itineraries brings together all unpublished material Forster wrote which can be classed as ‘memoir’.

English novelist E.M. Forster wrote his last and best-loved work, A Passage to India, both as a paean to his love for India and as a tribute to the relationships he formed with Indians. Forster became entranced by the India of the Raj at a young age, and his love affair with the sub-continent, its princes, and peoples, was to last all his life. At his most socially transgressive, it was with Indians that Forster chose to connect and with whom he put into effect his belief in man’s duty to value friendship over state or ideology. His time in India was undoubtedly when he was at his most human and most vulnerable. At once a contemporary reflection on India’s rich history and a biographical retelling of Forster’s travels through the country in the early 1900s, Developing the Heart delves into the past to better understand the profound impact certain events and people had on his writing. In doing so, it allows readers to look on as Forster matures and softens over time in his behaviour with others as well as with himself. Often using Forster’s own words to evoke a vivid landscape, this is the story of the most dramatic and exotic part of the life of one of England’s greatest novelists.

Published to mark the beginning of the Britten centenary year in 2013, Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer. In the eyes of many, Benjamin Britten was our finest composer since Purcell (a figure who often inspired him) three hundred years earlier. He broke decisively with the romantic, nationalist school of figures such as Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. With Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954), he arguably composed the last operas - from any composer in any country - which have entered both the popular consciousness and the musical canon. He did all this while carrying two disadvantages to worldly success - his passionately held pacifism, which made him suspect to the authorities during and immediately after the Second World War - and his homosexuality, specifically his forty-year relationship with Peter Pears, for whom many of his greatest operatic roles and vocal works were created. The atmosphere and personalities of Aldeburgh in his native Suffolk also form another wonderful dimension to the book. Kildea shows clearly how Britten made this creative community, notably with the foundation of the Aldeburgh Festival and the building of Snape Maltings, but also how costly the determination that this required was. Above all, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into his creative process as we are ever likely to go. Kildea reads dozens of Britten's works with enormous intelligence and sensitivity, in a way which those without formal musical training can understand. It is one of the most moving and enjoyable biographies of a creative artist of any kind to have appeared for years. Paul Kildea is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London.

Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city’s culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace other modes of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents a comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers—C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell—who she maintains have been cast as the canon of Alexandria. Attending to issues of genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers’ representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anticolonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas, one of which centers on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers’ and filmmakers’ engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.

Britten in Context offers historical, social, cultural, queer, musical, and political context for one of the pivotal British composers of the twentieth century. Engaging essays from leading scholars in music, art, theory, performance, religion, and cultural and music history reward readers of all academic levels.

E. M. Forster first encountered Billy Budd in 1926. Some twenty years later, he embarked on a collaboration with Benjamin Britten and Eric Crozier, adapting Melville’s novella for the opera stage. The libretto they produced poignantly reaffirmsthe Forsterian creed of salvation through personal relationships.This study presents an extensive exploration of Forster’s involvement in the interpretation, transformation and re-creation of Melville’s text. It situates the story of the Handsome Sailor in the wider context of Forster’s literary oeuvre, his life, and his lifewritings. In detailed readings, Billy Budd becomes a lens through which the themes, patterns and leitmotifs of Forsterian thought and creative imagination are brought into focus. A close re-examination of the libretto sketches serves to shed new light on the collaborative process in which Melville’s story was changed to fit an archetypal array of plot and character types that is central to Forster’s own storytelling.

British Literature and the Life of Institutions charts a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900, but it also marks a major intervention in current theoretical debates about critique and the dialectical imagination. By placing literary studies in dialogue with politicaltheory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, the book reclaims a substantive reformist language that we have ignored to our own loss. This reformist idiom made it possible to imagine the state as a speculative and aspirational idea--as a fully realized form of life rather than as an uninspiringensemble of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. This volume traces the resonances of this idiom from the Victorian period to modernism, ranging from Mary Augusta Ward, George Gissing, and H. G. Wells, to Edward Carpenter and E. M. Forster. Compared to this reformist language, theeconomism that dominates current debates about the welfare state signals an impoverishment that is at once intellectual, cultural, and political. Critiquing the shortcomings of the welfare state comes naturally to us, but we often struggle to offer up convincing defences of its principles and aims.This book intervenes in these debates by urging a richer understanding of critique: speculation, this provocative new study suggests, does not signify the cancellation of critique but an aspirational moment inherent in critique itself. If we want to defend the state, Kohlmann argues, we need tolearn to think about it again.

A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revise the novel's history. It also considers the novel's global reach while suggesting that the epoch of modernism is not yet finished.