The aim of the Abinger Editions is to provide a new, properly edited library of the literary works of E.M. Forster that does justice to his literary genius. When E.M. Forster felt that he had dried up as a novelist he turned to literary criticism, a field in which he excelled, as this compilation of his work demonstrates. Arnold Bennett called him the best reviewer in London.

These essays, lectures, memoirs, and broadcasts are the thought-provoking products of Forsters engagement with the literary, political, and social events of his time.

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

Over 3,200 entries An essential guide to authors and their works that focuses on the general canon of British literature from the fifteenth century to the present. There is also some coverage of non-fiction such as biographies, memoirs, and science, as well as inclusion of major American and Commonwealth writers. This online-exclusive new edition adds 60,000 new words, including over 50 new entries dealing with authors who have risen to prominence in the last five years, as well as fully updating the entries that currently exist. Each entry provides details of a writer's nationality and birth/death dates, followed by a listing of their titles arranged chronologically by date of publication.

Shortly before his death, S. P. Rosenbaum began work on the history of the Bloomsbury Group's 'Memoir Club'. With original archival material and valuable insights on leading Bloomsbury figures such as Woolf, Keynes and Forster, this illuminating book offers a new perspective on our understanding of twentieth-century autobiography and life writing.

On the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land’s creation, explosive impact, and enduring influence When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. “But,” as Jed Rasula writes, “The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.” In What the Thunder Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music. From its famous opening, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” to its closing Sanskrit mantra, “Shantih shantih shantih,” The Waste Land combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues to inspire readers. Along the way, we learn about Eliot’s storied circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose innovations have proven as consequential as those of the “men of 1914.” Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century’s most influential poem.

From the Author’s Preface: Birthdays are often the occasion for assessing earlier experiences and expressing hopes for the future. Opening the pages on a new century can stimulate a similar reckoning of accounts on a larger scale. January first of the year 1900 was both the beginning of a new century, as popular counting goes, and Edward Morgan Forster’s twenty-first birthday. As the Victorian era approached its conclusion, Forster was nearing the end of his studies at King’s College, Cambridge University. His great-aunt Marianne Thornton had left him the legacy that saw him through the university. But how would he support himself thereafter? The future was unclear until Nathaniel Wedd, a tutor who had become a good friend, encouraged him to seriously consider writing as a lifetime occupation. Forster eagerly grasped the idea. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, was published to popular approval before he was thirty years old. Forster’s first four novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, and Howards End, were all written within six years, between 1905 and 1910, with A Passage to India being published in 1924 and his homosexual novel, Maurice,seeing the light of day only after his death. All these novels were widely acclaimed when first published and are still in print. Forster had a mind full of projects on which he lavished his energy and prescient thoughts. His homosexuality was an ever-present black cloud affecting his actions and fears. The reader who wants a deeper treatment of that significant aspect of his life should read Wendy Moffat’s masterly—and graceful—volume, A Great Unrecorded History. Partly a biography of Forster, it is also a study of the era in which a conviction of homosexuality meant two years in prison doing hard labor. Homosexuality was also a challenge he had to confront every day. Another constant subject was freedom of speech and the threat of censorship, often in the name of national security. The reader may wonder at the multiplicity of footnotes. This is deliberate. Spirituality is a subject that can elicit many and diverse interpretations. The accumulated weight of Forster’s own words, assembled from his writings, buttresses my conclusion far more powerfully than could any paraphrases.

Thisis the first book focused on Forster's Maurice and its legacies in modernand contemporary fiction, film and new media. Ground-breaking essays by leadingscholars offernew readings by exploring overlooked contexts including: feminism and the'social purity' movement; anti-Fascism; religion and allegory; and earlytwentieth-century contestations over body-soul relation.

This spellbinding centenary biography by Neil Powell looks at the music, the life, and the legacy of the greatest British composer of the twentieth century Benjamin Britten was born on November 22, 1913, in the East Suffolk town of Lowestoft. Displaying a passion and proficiency for music at an early age, to the delight of his mother, Edith, a talented amateur musician herself, he began composing music when he was only five years old. After studying at the Royal College of Music, Britten went on to write documentary scores for the General Post Office Film Unit, where he met and collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden. Of more lasting importance was Britten's introduction in 1937 to the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become the inspirational center of his emotional and musical life. Their partnership lasted nearly four decades, during a dangerous time when homosexuality was illegal in England. Conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears followed Auden to America before the war began in 1939. While there, they joined the extraordinary Brooklyn ménage of George Davis, Louis MacNeice, and Paul Bowles. Eventually intense homesickness, provoked in part by George Crabbe's poem "Peter Grimes," drove the pair home to East Anglia in 1942 and gave Britten the inspiration for his finest opera. Throughout his career, Britten did not want modern music to be just for "the cultured few" and instead always composed his music to be "listenable-to." The shared quotidian lives of Britten and Pears unfold in this intimate biography and the story of two men who created a truly remarkable legacy.

The story they tell involves a number of major twentieth century literary personalities - Arnold Toynbee, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolf all participated in Forster's early translation project. Forster ultimately succeeded in launching Cavafy's reputation in the English-speaking world, setting an important precedent for his present global literary fame. The volume includes all extant letters, the earliest Cavafy translations by George Valassopoulos (incorporating Cavafy's own authorial emendations), poems by E.M.