The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the writings of E.M. Forster.

Nigel Rapport is an anthropologist, and it is to his colleagues that his book is primarily addressed. It is deliberately personal in its approach, being intended as 'a riposte to a current social-scientific drive towards an authorless discursivity' (x). He ascribes a major influence on his thought to English literature - above all to the work of E. M. Forster - and this certainly gives a novel form to the book, as, to use his own words, he 'zigzags between Anthropology and Literature' (36).

After an opening theoretical section concerned with the deconstructive attacks on the role of the author as a vital and active centre of anthropological writing, he proceeds to an …