Ford Madox Ford. Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations.

Ford Madox Ford.

Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations.

GASIOREK, Andrzej and Daniel MOORE (Eds.)

Rodopi

Series: International Ford Madox Ford Studies 7

Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2008, 285 pp.

Pb: 978-90-420-2437-3

Présentation de l'éditeur

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 or issue; and relates aspects of Ford's work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. The present book is part of a large-scale reassessment of his roles in literary history.

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'. In these, as in most of his books, Ford renders and analyses the crucial transformations in modern society and culture. One of the most striking features of his career is his close involvement with so many of the major international literary groupings of his time. In the South-East of England at the fin-de-siècle, he collaborated for a decade with Joseph Conrad, and befriended Henry James and H. G. Wells. In Edwardian London he founded the English Review, publishing these writers alongside his new discoveries, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. After the war he moved to France, founding the transatlantic review in Paris, taking on Hemingway as a sub-editor, discovering another generation of Modernists such as Jean Rhys and Basil Bunting, and publishing them alongside Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Besides his role as contributor and enabler to various versions of Modernism, Ford was also one of its most entertaining chroniclers.

This volume includes twelve new essays on Ford's engagement with the literary networks and cultural shifts of his era, by leading experts and younger scholars of Ford and Modernism. Two of the essays are by well-known creative writers: the novelist Colm Tóibín, and the novelist and cultural commentator Zinovy Zinik.

Table

Max SAUNDERS: General Editor's Preface

Andrzej GASIOREK and Daniel MOORE: Introduction: Transitions, Continuities, Networks, Nuclei

John ATTRIDGE: ‘We Will Listen to None but Specialists': Ford, the Rise of Specialization, and the English Review

Rob HAWKES: Personalities of Paper: Characterisation in A Call and The Good Soldier

Colm TÓIBÍN: Outsiders in England and the Art of Being Found Out

Andrzej GASIOREK: ‘Content to be Superseded'?: Ford in the Great London Vortex

Alan MUNTON: The Insane Subject: Ford and Wyndham Lewis in the War and Post-War

David TROTTER: Ford Against Lewis and Joyce

Max SAUNDERS: Ford and Impressionism

Nick HUBBLE: The Origins of Intermodernism in Ford Madox Ford's Parallax View

Isabelle BRASME: Between Impressionism and Modernism: Some Do Not . . ., a poetics of the Entre-deux

Andrew FRAYN: ‘This Battle Was not Over': Parade's End as a Transitional Text in the Development of ‘Disenchanted' First World War Literature

Zinovy ZINIK: Ford Madox Ford: Mentors, Disciples, and a Ring of Mail Conspirators

David JAMES: By Thrifty Design: Ford's Bequest and Coetzee's Homage

Contributors

Abstracts

Abbreviations