E. M. Forster, Lionel Trilling, and the American Turn, 1942-1953

Abstract

Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence, my essay documents how the transatlantic crossing of E. M. Forster`s literary corpus, from a Europe devastated by war to America, challenges one of Perry Anderson`s key claims about the postwar ＂contraflow＂ between the United States and England: that the sea change ＂modified Anglo more than American culture＂ (English Questions 204). Rather, the New York intellectual and literary critic, Lionel Trilling, succeeded in resituating Forster`s fiction cogently in terms of exigencies recognizable to a mass American readership in wartime and after, thereby securing Forster`s after-life in the American academy. Additionally, Trilling`s success imparted scale to the transatlantic turn, by making Forster`s newly transformed body of work amenable to ideological re-export, back again across the Atlantic, to England. As such, the pairing offered a historically significant corrective, during the decade following Pearl Harbor, to more reactionary critical formations within literary Modernism, at a time when both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had returned to nationalist bases when endorsing literature as a vehicle for culture. I conclude by affirming that the Forster-Trilling transatlantic combination served uniquely sociohistorical, interpretively occasional, and yet critically significant scalars beyond the nationalizing function of English literature and its criticism at that time.