How long does it take to read Aspects of the Novel?
Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster takes about 3 hours 14 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 14 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1927. 176 pages, about 48,400 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 23 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 14 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 1 minute |
The page count is the median across 59 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Clark Lectures, sponsored by Trinity College of the University of Cambridge, have had a long and distinguished history and have featured remarks by some of England's most important literary minds. Leslie Stephen, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson and I.A. Richards have all given celebrated and widely influential talks as the keynote speaker. One of the Lectures' most important milestones came in 1927 when, for the first time, a novelist was invited to speak. E.M. Forster had recently published his masterpiece, A Passage to India, and rose to the occasion, delivering eight spirited and penetrating lectures on the novel. The decision to accept the lectureship was actually a difficult one for Forster, as he had deeply ambivalent feelings about the use of criticism. Although suspecting that criticism was somewhat antithetical to creation, and upset by the thought that time spent preparing for the lectures was time away from his own work, Forster accepted. His talks were witty and informal, and they consisted of sharp, penetrating bursts of insight rather than overly-methodical analysis. They were a great success. Published later as Aspects of the Novel, the ideas articulated in his lectures would gain widespread recognition and currency in twentieth century criticism.Of all the insights contained in Aspects of the Novel, none has been more influential or widely discussed than Forster's discussion of "flat" and "round" characters. So familiar by now as to seem commonplace, Forster's distinction is meant to categorize the different qualities of characters in literature and examine the purposes to which they are put. A "flat" character, according to Forster, can be summed up n a single sentence and acts as a function of only a few fixed character traits. "Round" characters are capable of surprise, contradiction, and change; they are representations of human beings in all of their complexity. Forster's aim, however, is not to elevate the round at the expense of…
Subjects: Fiction, History and criticism, English fiction, Technique, English fiction, history and criticism, History & criticism
