The book includes a courcse of lectures which were delivered by E.M. Forster under the auspices of Trtinity College, Cambridge in the spring of 1927. The driving force behind this book, according to the author, is the affort to see through novels and not round them. He discards the weighty 'historical' view with its cumbersome apparatus of 'tendencies', influences and the 'periods' and instead imagines all novelists at work together in a circular.
