In the following essay, Schwarz analyzes Aspects of the Novel within the context of Forster's own novel writing and that of his peers.

E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927) remains a cornerstone of Anglo-American novel criticism. Forster's study helped define the values and questions with which we have approached novels for the past several decades. Moreover, today it still addresses the crucial questions that concern us about form, point of view, and the relationship between art and life. While acknowledging the importance of Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) in extending the James aesthetic, the brilliance of Virginia Woolf's insights in her essays in The Common Reader (1925) and elsewhere, and the usefulness of Edwin Muir' s The Structure of the Novel (1928), I believe that Forster's book is the one of those 1920's books on the novel to which we most frequently return to learn about how...