Aspects of the Novel

E. M. Forster's Clark Lectures, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1927 and published by Arnold the same year. A foundational text in the criticism of English fiction, famous for its distinction between 'flat' and 'round' characters and its analytical approach to narrative time.

The lectures take up the novel under a sequence of formal categories — story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm — working out the analytic vocabulary through close discussion of writers including Defoe, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Tolstoy, James and Proust. The contrast between flat and round characters and the distinction between story and plot were crystallised in these chapters and entered general critical use almost at once.

Edward Arnold was Forster's principal publisher for fiction and belles-lettres, and the firm issued the Clark Lectures as a single volume in the same year they were delivered. The text became required reading on twentieth-century English literature, narrative theory and creative-writing programmes, and remains in print under the imprint's successor lines. Of interest to literary critics, students of narrative form and general readers of English fiction alike.