E. M. Forsters Material Humanism

Through attending to the nonhuman, E. M. Forsters Material Humanism: Queer Matters places Forsters fiction in conversation with contemporary debates concerned with the intersection of neomaterialism, environmental humanities, and queer ecology. The book revisits Forsters liberal humanism from a materialist perspective by focusing on humans embodied activities in artificial and natural environments. By examining the everyday embodied experiences of characters, the book thus brings to the fore insignificant and sometimes overlooked aspects in Forsters fiction. It also places importance on the texts treatment of queer intimacy as an embodied experience that can transcend sexual desire. The book acknowledges nonhuman agency as central to our understanding of queerness in Forsters texts and studies the representation of formless matters such as dust as a way through which Forsters ecological concerns arise by linking the fate of oppressed humans with oppressed nonhuman others.