[Review of] Frank Kermode, 2009. Concerning E.M. Forster. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

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Among Frank Kermode’s many fields of expertise wasliterary modernism. After making his name as a scholar of Shakespeare’s era andRomanticism, Kermode wrote on Yeats and T.S. Eliot in his most influentialbook, The Sense of an Ending (1967),and produced the ‘Fontana Modern Masters’ volume on D.H. Lawrence in 1973. Inthe words of Stefan Collini (2014), Kermode was ‘pre-eminent among theEnglish-language literary critics who came to maturity in the second half ofthe twentieth century’. Concerning E.M.Forster was his last book, appearing a year before his death. In it, twenty-firstcentury Forster scholars will re-encounter some distinctive and powerful twentieth-centuryhypotheses. They will also gain some flashes of insight indicating futuredirections for Forster studies.