Conrad and Forster: Not Only a Matter of Style
Conrad and Forster: Not Only a Matter of Style

Author(s): Andrzej Busza
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Summary/Abstract: Although a whole generation separated them, as active novelists Joseph Conrad andE. M. Forster were virtually contemporaries, producing their best work (with oneexception) in the decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The essayjuxtaposes the two writers, using one as a foil to the other, and thereby demonstratingthe co-presence of two distinct and in telling ways contrary strains in early twentieth-century British writing. Both writers reveal residual legacies of the Romanticmovement. However, whereas Conrad still has in many ways a nineteenth-centuryframe of mind and sensibility, Forster is already a post-Victorian, designated by manyan Edwardian, or even a Georgian, as Virginia Woolf prefers to classify him. WhileConrad shows certain positivist and organicist tendencies, stressing, among otherthings, the importance of communal bonds: duty, solidarity, loyalty, tradition; Forster,feeling threatened by the mass pressures, sprawl, muddle, and fragmentation of themodern world, values above all individual vision, personal relations and the internalorder of art. In a broadly philosophical sense, Conrad is an absolutist and his ethicshave a formal character; while Forster’s ethics overlap with his aesthetic proclivities,are relativistic and subjectivist. These distinctions are reflected in the nature of theirprose and the structure of their narratives.

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