Discussion of E. M. Forster and modernism might well be brief. Forster was scarcely a modernist. His career followed a path distinct from those of the major modernist writers, coming close only in A Passage to India to the innovative forms distinguishing their writing. Forster can nevertheless be usefully considered - as a novelist and a critic - alongside modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. Gaps between his writing and theirs open worthwhile lines of enquiry about the nature of each - in particular, about the pace and enthusiasm with which different authors altered their strategies in response to the challenges of modernity experienced early in the twentieth century.

Forster summarised these challenges in a lecture delivered in 1944. Assessing 'English Prose between 1918 and 1939', he emphasised the influence of 'a huge economic movement which has been taking the whole world, Great Britain included, from agriculture towards industrialism' - a process, he explains, which 'began about a hundred and fifty years ago'. '[P]ersonally, I hate it', he adds. 'So I imagine do most writers' (TCD, p. 267). Other critics were offering similar historical perspectives around the same time. Forster's 'huge economic movement' corresponds closely with the 'project of modernity' - based on faiths in reason, technology, progress, and industry - which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer influentially defined in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), retracing its origins to Enlightenment thinking and the Industrial Revolution in the later eighteenth century.