A Study Of Rhythms In A Room With A View

Edward Morgan Forster enjoys a lasting popularity as one of the major novelistsand critics in the20thcentury English literature. His achievements as a novelist havebeen widely acknowledged as great as those of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.Forster leaves behind him altogether six remarkable and fabulous novels, amongwhich A Room with a View is in many ways his best-controlled and most realizedpiece of work. More importantly, Forster is the first writer to have ever borrowed theterm rhythm from music to be applied to novel criticism and has helped to establish anew approach to the interpretation of fiction from the aspect of rhythm. Ever since thepublication of his well-known critical document Aspects of the Novel in1927,Forster’s position as an important literary critic is firmly established. To some critics,the concept of rhythm is his greatest contribution to the art of novel.The present paper undertakes to make a more systematic and comprehensivestudy on the specific uses and aesthetic effects of rhythms in A Room with a View. Onthe basis of Forster’s own concepts concerning rhythms which are defined in Aspectsof the Novel, Chapter Two elaborately explores and illustrates the first type of rhythmeasy rhythm which appears in this novel in the form of leitmotifs of key phrases,recurrent images and expanding symbols while the second type of rhythm difficultrhythm is well touched upon in Chapter Three, focusing on the interconnectedness orharmonious internal order achieved by the movements of characters and incidents.Chapter Four mainly emphasizes the interpretation of rhythms created by thealternation of narrative movements under the guidance of the French literary criticGérard Genette’s relevant narrative theories expounded in Narrative Discourse. Thepaper reaches the conclusion that one of Forster’s greatest achievements as a novelistlies in his skillful creation and distinctive appreciation of rhythms of various typeswhich deserves our serious and continuous attention.