E. M. Forster delivered the Clark lectures at Cambridge University in 1927; these were published that same year under the title Aspects of the Novel, and still enjoy influence even in our postmodern era. Eighty years later, in 2007, the same lecture series was delivered by Frank Kermode, who at ninety years of age continues to be the best literary critic in England. In honor of this eightieth anniversary, Kermode chose Forster as his subject for the Clark lectures, and his thoughts can now be read in Concerning E. M. Forster, the published version of the talks.

Both Forster and Kermode held fellowships at King’s College, Cambridge, but, as Kermode points out, the routes by which they made their way there were very different, the contrast being illustrative of the growing professionalization of academia, and particularly of literary studies, after the Second World War. The upper-middle-class Forster was admitted to King’s as an undergraduate at the end of the Victorian era; he went on, as everyone knows, to a distinguished literary career and, in 1946, was offered an Honorary Fellowship and a home at the college, where he resided from 1953 until his death in 1970. Kermode, born exactly forty years after Forster, went the red brick route, graduating from Liverpool University in 1940. He went on to teach at Newcastle, Reading, Manchester, and Bristol Universities and University College, London, before accepting a chair at Cambridge and his own