![]() Among Forster’s works his fiction, notably the novels The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End and Maurice and certain short stories, is present, but equal weight is given to his non-fiction, for example his diaries and journals, various essays, his Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography, and “West Hackhurst: A Surrey Ramble”, his little-known but highly revealing account of his life in Surrey and family connections there. ![]() Six places of radically varying sizes are covered in this way: Sawston (an imaginative construct based on Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells in Kent) ‘Wild England’ Surrey London King’s College, Cambridge Rooksnest, Stevenage, Hertfordshire. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular English place and traces its presence and alterations throughout Forster’s writings. The introductory chapter is a survey of approaches to space and place produced in different disciplines, including philosophy, narratology, literary criticism, human geography and sociolinguistics, which proposes a tripartite model of literary place: physical encounters (incorporating a personal dimension in an academic study of literary place), loco-reference and intra-textual landscapes. These zones are conceptualized with a multiple London at the centre, then the Home Counties and a notion of Wild England as concentric circles beyond. This study proposes a ‘deep locational criticism’ derived by combining the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre with empirical topographic and historical approaches to the particular English zones with which Forster was most familiar. Forster’s concern with the imaginative and emotional aspects of place is well-known, the specifics of what he meant by place and the way it changed throughout his seventy-year writing career are not.
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