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.

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.