Ford Madox Ford - novelist, poet, critic, champion of young authors, travel writer, chronicler of his own times - was a man "mad about writing." As Ezra Pound observed, Ford "actually lived the heroic artistic life that Yeats talked about." An incorrigible bohemian who passed as "a nice old gentleman at a tea party," Ford devoted himself to literature and the arts, founding two important literary magazines, The English Review and the transatlantic review, and writing over eighty books, including The Good Soldier and Parade's End.
For students and readers new to the work of Ford Madox Ford, this volume provides a comprehensive introduction to one of the most complex, important and fascinating authors. Bringing together leading Ford scholars, the volume places Ford's work in the context of significant literary, artistic and historical events and movements. Individual essays consider Ford's theory of literary Impressionism and the impact of the First World War; illuminate The Good Soldier and Parade's End; engage with topics such as the city, gender, national identity and politics; discuss Ford as an autobiographer, poet, propagandist, sociologist, Edwardian and modernist; and show his importance as founding editor of the groundbreaking English Review and transatlantic review. The volume encourages detailed close reading of Ford's writing and illustrates the importance of engaging with secondary sources.
The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. This series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies was founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme, issue, or work; and relates aspects of Ford’s writing, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade’s End, which Anthony Burgess described as ‘the finest novel about the First World War’, Samuel Hynes has called ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’, and which was adapted by Tom Stoppard for the acclaimed 2012 BBC/HBO television series, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall. The twelve essays in this volume, Ford Madox Ford’s Cosmopolis, focus directly on the internationalism so important to Ford, and bring out three main ideas. First, his lifelong commitment to an international vision of literature and culture. Second, ‘Cosmopolis’ also refers to Ford’s experiences of the particular cosmopolitan cities he lived in: London, Paris, New York. Third, the idea that his lifelong experience of Paris in particular informed and shaped his writing. Ford’s Cosmopolis is thus not only an ideal city or state open to such cosmopolitan exchange. It is also a mode of writing which invents forms and styles to render the experience of such hybridity, diversity, fluidity, and tolerance. Contributors are: Alexandra Becquet, Helen Chambers, Martina Ciceri, Laurence Davies, Claire Davison, Annalisa Federici, Georges Létissier, Caroline Patey, Andrea Rummel, Max Saunders, Rob Spence, Martin Stannard, George Wickes, Joseph Wiesenfarth.
Engaging and energetic, this biography of Ford Madox Ford presents the modernist writer in a previously unexplored way. Other biographies have approached Ford as an author; indeed, his memoirs give almost no indication that the women in his life were of any importance or, in fact, that they ever existed. Literary scholar Joseph Wiesenfarth revises this approach by tracing Ford's relationships with four women central to his life. Wiesenfarth shows how these four women--Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala--established themselves as artists in their own right and depicted Ford in their works as more than the "proper man" he thought himself to be. For the women, he was both a lover and a leaver, a collaborator and a companion. With an eye to original paintings and manuscripts, Wiesenfarth examines the artistic and romantic interplay among these writers, painters, and lovers. This book features a beautifully illustrated color and black-and-white gallery of Bowen and Biala paintings.
The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. This series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies was founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme, issue, or work; and relates aspects of Ford’s writing, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade’s End, which Anthony Burgess described as ‘the finest novel about the First World War’, Samuel Hynes has called ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’, and which was adapted by Tom Stoppard for the acclaimed 2012 BBC/HBO television series, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall. Parade’s End is the subject of the fifteen essays here, by both established experts and new scholars. The volume includes groundbreaking work on the psycho-geography of the war in Ford’s novels; on how the war intensifies self-consciousness about performance and sensation; and on the other writers and artists Ford drew upon, and argued with, in producing his post-war masterpiece.
Ford Madox Ford's Modernity explores the relation between modern writing and modern experience. It examines how his prose registers the impact on society and the arts of new technologies, such as railways and telephones. It demonstrates how Ford’s writing reflects, and elaborates, new conceptions of subjectivity, gender, nation and empire. And it establishes his contribution to the growing sense of crisis in the fields of history, epistemology, and representation. It includes essays by twenty leading Ford scholars on a wide range of his fiction and criticism, giving particular attention to The Good Soldier and to his responses to modern war.
This book spans the most significant phases of Ford's literary production, from his art criticism to his main modernist novels: The Good Soldier, Parade's End, The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh. The aim is to explore the uncharted territory of Ford's interest in the scopic field, claiming that his investigation of the optical unconscious is his most original contribution to the modernist concern for the stream of consciousness. This is the first in-depth study of Ford's interest in the gaze and how it is related to writing, painting, music, sculpture, visual technologies and forms of popular entertainment. Undermining the clichéd critical vision of Ford as the last Pre-Raphaelite or proto-Futurist, this study analyses Ford's fascination with the visual avant-garde and his response to the revolution of photography and (proto-) cinematographic forms from the specific angle of the scopic drive. Part history, part theoretical discussion embedded in the close reading of the texts, this book is also concerned with Ford as a great stylist whose writing strives to project an image of itself and its structures in the reader's eye. Drawing inspiration from psychoanalysis and art criticism, the author capitalises on the theories of Jacques Lacan, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Jonathan Crary, and Norman Bryson to disclose the fascinating and baffling universe of Ford's gaze. This is a revised and extended English translation of the original book Ford Madox Ford: Visione/visualità e scrittura.
The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. The book series, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, has been founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in Ford’s life and work. Each volume will normally be based upon a particular theme or issue. Each will relate aspects of Ford’s work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade’s End, which Anthony Burgess described as ‘the finest novel about the First World War’; and Samuel Hynes has called ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’. However, critics of Edwardian and Modernist literature have been increasingly turning to Ford’s brilliant 1905 experiment in Impressionism, The Soul of London, as an exemplary text. Ford Madox Ford and the City assembles fourteen pioneering essays, by new as well as established European and American scholars, exploring Ford’s representations of real and ideal cities, across the full range of his work, from his earliest verse, to his post-war prose and poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. The volume is divided into three sections. The first focuses on his changing views of London, with The Soul of London taking pride of place. The second concentrates on the other great cities Ford lived and worked in – Paris and New York – as well as considering the role of the virtual or fantasy city. Besides reflecting new developments in research on Ford, the collection represents a significant contribution to studies in Modernism, literature and the city, Englishness and nationality. It concludes with three masterly essays by Ford himself – two of them published here for the first time – on cities he visited during his travels through America in the 1930s: Boston, Denver and Nashville.
A critical biography of the great modernist editor and novelist. Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) lived among several of the most important artists and writers of his time. Raised by Pre-Raphaelites and friends with Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, Ford was a leading figure of the avant-garde in pre-WWI London, responsible for publishing Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. After the war, he moved to Paris, published Gertrude Stein, and discovered Ernest Hemingway. A prolific writer in his own right, Ford wrote the modernist triumph The Good Soldier (1915) as well as one of the finest war stories in English, the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–1928). Drawing on newly discovered letters and photographs, this critical biography further demonstrates Ford’s vital contribution to modern fiction, poetry, and criticism.
A masterpiece of early Modernism, The Good Soldier tells the story of the unfolding relationships between two couples in the words of an archetypal 'unreliable narrator'. Its portrayal of the destruction of a civilized elite is a work of unforgettable power and literary skill, here accompanied by Ford's important essay 'On Impressionism'.
