'People are not everything': An ecocritical study of E. M. Forster's novels

This thesis traces the evolution of E. M. Forster's depiction of the nonhuman world throughout his six novels. These novels are set in three countries of importance: Italy, England, and India. Forster's Italian novels present a limited view of the natural world, one in which the land is merely symbolic or represented by supposedly primitive characters. His novels set in England do bring the country's natural land to the forefront and reveal a concern for humanity's effect upon it; however, these works fall into the pastoral tradition which upholds an idealized nostalgia for the rural past, and they consequently still define the nonhuman world in terms of human use and perception. Only in his powerful final novel, A Passage to India , does Forster portray an independent, active landscape that is indifferent to the human characters and plays its own important role.