Guides

Forster: A Room With a View

In this course, Professor Max Saunders (King's College, London) explores E. M. Forster's 1908 novel, A Room With a View. The course begins by thinking about the importance of guides and guidebooks in the novel, focusing in particular on the faulty guidebook that Lucy uses to explore the artwork of Florence. After that, in the second and third modules, we think about the importance of touch in the novel, first in terms of the 'tactile values' of Renaissance art, and then in terms of the 'undeveloped hearts' of Forster's characters. In the fourth module, we turn to the presentation of the physical and metaphysical in the novel – focusing in particular on Lucy's experiences in the Piazza della Signoria in Chapter 4 – before moving on in the fifth and final module to think about the novel's presentation of beauty and love.

Guides

In this module, we think about the importance of guides and guidebooks in the novel, focusing in particular on Miss Honeychurch's use of a travel guide to explore the city of Florence, a guide which turns out to be inaccurate when it offers some misinformation about the story of San Giovanni Gualberto. What is the importance of this scene? And how does it bear on the events later in the novel?