Christopher GoGwilt
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199751624
- eISBN:
- 9780199866199
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751624.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter 3 studies the formation of English modernism around the founding of Ford Madox Ford's two reviews, The English Review in 1908 and the transatlantic review in 1924, tracing the relation ...
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Chapter 3 studies the formation of English modernism around the founding of Ford Madox Ford's two reviews, The English Review in 1908 and the transatlantic review in 1924, tracing the relation between Ford's consecration of Conrad as pioneering modernist and his promotion of Jean Rhys as part of a new modernist avant-garde. Framed by discussion of Rhys's citation of a passage from Conrad's Almayer's Folly in the novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the chapter examines Ford's critical emphasis on the linguistic effect of individual English words in excerpted passages of Conradian prose. Rhys's own economy of description sheds light on the celebrated Conradian search for the mot juste, revealing a problematic priority of cultural identity in the linguistic and literary formation of early twentieth-century English modernism.Less
Chapter 3 studies the formation of English modernism around the founding of Ford Madox Ford's two reviews, The English Review in 1908 and the transatlantic review in 1924, tracing the relation between Ford's consecration of Conrad as pioneering modernist and his promotion of Jean Rhys as part of a new modernist avant-garde. Framed by discussion of Rhys's citation of a passage from Conrad's Almayer's Folly in the novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the chapter examines Ford's critical emphasis on the linguistic effect of individual English words in excerpted passages of Conradian prose. Rhys's own economy of description sheds light on the celebrated Conradian search for the mot juste, revealing a problematic priority of cultural identity in the linguistic and literary formation of early twentieth-century English modernism.
Sara Haslam
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060557
- eISBN:
- 9781781700099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060557.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The enriching and rewarding aspects of modernism (such as myth and self-discovery), as presented in Ford Madox Ford's positive fictions, were the subject of the previous two chapters. This chapter ...
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The enriching and rewarding aspects of modernism (such as myth and self-discovery), as presented in Ford Madox Ford's positive fictions, were the subject of the previous two chapters. This chapter examines which aspects of modernism are manifested in Ford's faith in the act of writing itself – the regenerative or the terrible – and considers Ford's creative dynamic, his techniques and his literary rules for the writing of prose. Using a range of Ford's writing, it addresses the question of which aspects of modernism ultimately hold sway in Ford's oeuvre. The chapter also analyses Ford's theoretical, modernist stances and considers impressionism as well as Ford's position in the modernist subjectivity versus objectivity debate. Concluding with an analysis of memory and its role in the modernist quest, it also returns the book to its beginnings, and a writer who believed in pictures of the past, and the present, and sought to write them, however difficult.Less
The enriching and rewarding aspects of modernism (such as myth and self-discovery), as presented in Ford Madox Ford's positive fictions, were the subject of the previous two chapters. This chapter examines which aspects of modernism are manifested in Ford's faith in the act of writing itself – the regenerative or the terrible – and considers Ford's creative dynamic, his techniques and his literary rules for the writing of prose. Using a range of Ford's writing, it addresses the question of which aspects of modernism ultimately hold sway in Ford's oeuvre. The chapter also analyses Ford's theoretical, modernist stances and considers impressionism as well as Ford's position in the modernist subjectivity versus objectivity debate. Concluding with an analysis of memory and its role in the modernist quest, it also returns the book to its beginnings, and a writer who believed in pictures of the past, and the present, and sought to write them, however difficult.
Sara Haslam
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060557
- eISBN:
- 9781781700099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060557.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter introduces the concept of Ford Madox Ford's ‘positive fictions’, and offers a way of reading Ford's dedication to his grandfather as well as to his grandfather's circle (especially the ...
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This chapter introduces the concept of Ford Madox Ford's ‘positive fictions’, and offers a way of reading Ford's dedication to his grandfather as well as to his grandfather's circle (especially the Pre-Raphaelites) that feeds into the content and the visual style of these texts. It also reintroduces the ‘woman question’, focusing on four novels that reconstruct worlds of alternative systems which emanate from the fragmented consciousness of men such as Grimshaw. These novels are The ‘Half Moon’ (1909), Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), The New Humpty Dumpty (1912) and The Young Lovell (1913). In some texts, Ford investigates the contemporary rage/fear in male reactions to women, together with the healing qualities of what Carl Jung termed the female archetypes. Jung's theories, and Robert Graves's writings, are used as part of an illuminatory test of Jung's assertion that ‘our world seems to be dis-infected of witches’, when the world is Ford's positive fictions. These fictions possess roots that mean the multiple perspectives central to modernism often regenerate as well as destroy.Less
This chapter introduces the concept of Ford Madox Ford's ‘positive fictions’, and offers a way of reading Ford's dedication to his grandfather as well as to his grandfather's circle (especially the Pre-Raphaelites) that feeds into the content and the visual style of these texts. It also reintroduces the ‘woman question’, focusing on four novels that reconstruct worlds of alternative systems which emanate from the fragmented consciousness of men such as Grimshaw. These novels are The ‘Half Moon’ (1909), Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), The New Humpty Dumpty (1912) and The Young Lovell (1913). In some texts, Ford investigates the contemporary rage/fear in male reactions to women, together with the healing qualities of what Carl Jung termed the female archetypes. Jung's theories, and Robert Graves's writings, are used as part of an illuminatory test of Jung's assertion that ‘our world seems to be dis-infected of witches’, when the world is Ford's positive fictions. These fictions possess roots that mean the multiple perspectives central to modernism often regenerate as well as destroy.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in ...
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This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in Seven Men. The critical tradition has been excessively preoccupied with trying to identify the speakers and ‘originals’ of each section of Mauberley. It argues that, seen in relation to the growing interest in portrait collections, composite portraiture, the disturbances in auto/biography, and imaginary art‐works, this poem sequence can be read as a parody of the forms of literary memoir, through which Pound also explores autobiography.Less
This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in Seven Men. The critical tradition has been excessively preoccupied with trying to identify the speakers and ‘originals’ of each section of Mauberley. It argues that, seen in relation to the growing interest in portrait collections, composite portraiture, the disturbances in auto/biography, and imaginary art‐works, this poem sequence can be read as a parody of the forms of literary memoir, through which Pound also explores autobiography.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist ...
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This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.Less
This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.
Patrick Deer
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199239887
- eISBN:
- 9780191716782
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239887.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like ...
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Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like Muirhead Bone and war poets like Rupert Brooke, this chapter argues that most urgent task confronting the military authorities was to bridge the gulf between the commanding strategic perspective and the collapses of vision in the trench labyrinth of the Western Front. It explores how despite its notorious failures the war machine used propaganda, censorship, military discipline, camouflage and other new technologies to recapture the oversight of battle, turning the imperial sovereign gaze on the minds and bodies of the mass army in the trenches. Despite antimodernism on the home front, the military authorities covertly cannibalized modernist culture in their struggle to modernize. But the camouflaged modernism of Rosenberg, Vera Brittain, or Ford's Parade's End demonstrates a more sceptical response to the dominant perspective of war.Less
Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like Muirhead Bone and war poets like Rupert Brooke, this chapter argues that most urgent task confronting the military authorities was to bridge the gulf between the commanding strategic perspective and the collapses of vision in the trench labyrinth of the Western Front. It explores how despite its notorious failures the war machine used propaganda, censorship, military discipline, camouflage and other new technologies to recapture the oversight of battle, turning the imperial sovereign gaze on the minds and bodies of the mass army in the trenches. Despite antimodernism on the home front, the military authorities covertly cannibalized modernist culture in their struggle to modernize. But the camouflaged modernism of Rosenberg, Vera Brittain, or Ford's Parade's End demonstrates a more sceptical response to the dominant perspective of war.
Andrew Frayn
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719089220
- eISBN:
- 9781781707333
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089220.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The novel series of Ford Madox Ford and R. H. Mottram show clearly the development of disenchantment in the latter part of the post-war decade. Both write between the Victorian and the modern, ...
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The novel series of Ford Madox Ford and R. H. Mottram show clearly the development of disenchantment in the latter part of the post-war decade. Both write between the Victorian and the modern, demonstrating a loyalty to the realist form but also engaging with new literary metaphors and techniques. Ford’s Parade’s End (1924-8) and R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924-7) both feature a bureaucrat protagonist, the quintessential modern figure emblematising the impact of mechanisation and mass culture on individuals and social structures. Both adapt the family saga form: Ford uses subtle time shifts, while Mottram’s narratives intersect through a single location. Contextual links are made with contemporary philosophies and scientific discoveries about time and space. Both series highlight the intensification of disenchantment, and in particular Ford’s Last Post (1928) is an indictment of post-war decline in Britain.Less
The novel series of Ford Madox Ford and R. H. Mottram show clearly the development of disenchantment in the latter part of the post-war decade. Both write between the Victorian and the modern, demonstrating a loyalty to the realist form but also engaging with new literary metaphors and techniques. Ford’s Parade’s End (1924-8) and R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924-7) both feature a bureaucrat protagonist, the quintessential modern figure emblematising the impact of mechanisation and mass culture on individuals and social structures. Both adapt the family saga form: Ford uses subtle time shifts, while Mottram’s narratives intersect through a single location. Contextual links are made with contemporary philosophies and scientific discoveries about time and space. Both series highlight the intensification of disenchantment, and in particular Ford’s Last Post (1928) is an indictment of post-war decline in Britain.
Jerome Boyd Maunsell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198789369
- eISBN:
- 9780191831232
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198789369.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries), 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines Ford’s reminiscences—Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (1911), Thus to Revisit (1921), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Return to Yesterday (1931), and It ...
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This chapter examines Ford’s reminiscences—Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (1911), Thus to Revisit (1921), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Return to Yesterday (1931), and It Was the Nightingale (1934). The chapter begins with a discussion of different degrees of autobiography, and the difference between autobiography and autobiographical forms including the roman à clef. It then traces the evolution of Ford’s reminiscences from his early “Literary Portraits” up to Mightier Than the Sword (1938). It argues that Ford forged a new genre, fusing fact and fiction to portray his contemporaries. Ford’s reminiscences are seen as group portraits, and Ford’s accounts of Conrad, James, Lewis, Stein, and Wells are discussed. The chapter also examines how the pivotal experience of the First World War was avoided by Ford in all his autobiographies, and how Ford also omitted his relationships with women in his reminiscences.Less
This chapter examines Ford’s reminiscences—Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (1911), Thus to Revisit (1921), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Return to Yesterday (1931), and It Was the Nightingale (1934). The chapter begins with a discussion of different degrees of autobiography, and the difference between autobiography and autobiographical forms including the roman à clef. It then traces the evolution of Ford’s reminiscences from his early “Literary Portraits” up to Mightier Than the Sword (1938). It argues that Ford forged a new genre, fusing fact and fiction to portray his contemporaries. Ford’s reminiscences are seen as group portraits, and Ford’s accounts of Conrad, James, Lewis, Stein, and Wells are discussed. The chapter also examines how the pivotal experience of the First World War was avoided by Ford in all his autobiographies, and how Ford also omitted his relationships with women in his reminiscences.
Sara Haslam
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060557
- eISBN:
- 9781781700099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060557.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Ford Madox Ford admired Ivan Turgenev, so it is not surprising that one comes across ideas borrowed, perhaps, from him in the later writer's work. In this case, though, there is a development at ...
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Ford Madox Ford admired Ivan Turgenev, so it is not surprising that one comes across ideas borrowed, perhaps, from him in the later writer's work. In this case, though, there is a development at work; a development precipitated by World War I. Turgenev's self-confessed nihilist Bazarov expresses amazement at the tenacity of human belief in words – words that, in his example, can diminish and deaden a feeling of catastrophe. Were he to find himself instead in the volumes of Parade's End (or one of a number of other war novels), Bazarov's amazement would be tempered. Ford, post-war, has lost belief in words. He is often unsatisfied with the capacity of language to express the totality of thought or experience; speech constantly ‘gives out’, to be replaced by his most characteristic grammatical tool: ellipsis. Two quotations provide a framework for an exploration into how and why sight functions in the fragmentation of war. The first is from John Keegan's book, The Face of Battle; the second from Frederic Manning's novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune.Less
Ford Madox Ford admired Ivan Turgenev, so it is not surprising that one comes across ideas borrowed, perhaps, from him in the later writer's work. In this case, though, there is a development at work; a development precipitated by World War I. Turgenev's self-confessed nihilist Bazarov expresses amazement at the tenacity of human belief in words – words that, in his example, can diminish and deaden a feeling of catastrophe. Were he to find himself instead in the volumes of Parade's End (or one of a number of other war novels), Bazarov's amazement would be tempered. Ford, post-war, has lost belief in words. He is often unsatisfied with the capacity of language to express the totality of thought or experience; speech constantly ‘gives out’, to be replaced by his most characteristic grammatical tool: ellipsis. Two quotations provide a framework for an exploration into how and why sight functions in the fragmentation of war. The first is from John Keegan's book, The Face of Battle; the second from Frederic Manning's novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune.
Sara Haslam
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060557
- eISBN:
- 9781781700099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060557.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Isaiah Berlin writes in Four Essays on Liberty that ‘historians of ideas cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern’. Where modernism is credited with a pattern, and it ...
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Isaiah Berlin writes in Four Essays on Liberty that ‘historians of ideas cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern’. Where modernism is credited with a pattern, and it usually is, it is more than likely that the concept of fragmentation is prominent in it. This book puts novelist, poet, editor and critic Ford Madox Ford in context, placing him in the context of literary modernism, in which, as editor of the English Review, author of The Good Soldier and transformer of Ezra Pound's verse, he performed a vital part. Indeed, in his magisterial biography of Ford, Max Saunders writes that ‘the period of literary modernism is “the Ford era” as much as it is Pound's, or T. S. Eliot's, or James Joyce's’; Ford was ‘at the centre of the three most innovative groups of writers this century’. In addition, the language of decline, collapse and fragmentation is commonly applied by historical analysts to events and developments of the early twentieth century.Less
Isaiah Berlin writes in Four Essays on Liberty that ‘historians of ideas cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern’. Where modernism is credited with a pattern, and it usually is, it is more than likely that the concept of fragmentation is prominent in it. This book puts novelist, poet, editor and critic Ford Madox Ford in context, placing him in the context of literary modernism, in which, as editor of the English Review, author of The Good Soldier and transformer of Ezra Pound's verse, he performed a vital part. Indeed, in his magisterial biography of Ford, Max Saunders writes that ‘the period of literary modernism is “the Ford era” as much as it is Pound's, or T. S. Eliot's, or James Joyce's’; Ford was ‘at the centre of the three most innovative groups of writers this century’. In addition, the language of decline, collapse and fragmentation is commonly applied by historical analysts to events and developments of the early twentieth century.
Sara Haslam
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060557
- eISBN:
- 9781781700099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060557.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Developing the discussion of religion, this chapter compares Ford Madox Ford's fantasy novel, The Young Lovell (1913), with the poem ‘On Heaven’, written at the same period. It seeks the religious ...
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Developing the discussion of religion, this chapter compares Ford Madox Ford's fantasy novel, The Young Lovell (1913), with the poem ‘On Heaven’, written at the same period. It seeks the religious equivalent of the symbolic healing of women and investigates the peculiarly Fordian notion of peace. ‘Fantasies are scenarios of desire’, according to Peter Gay; they are ‘in touch with the deepest motions of the mind, principally its unmet needs’. In ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Sigmund Freud examines the often ordinarily sublimated extension of the childhood need for fantasy and play as expressed in creative writing. In The Young Lovell and ‘On Heaven’, Ford's desire, his fantasy, is to do with being seen. Not for these characters Dowell's ‘mortifying’ experience of having Leonora's ‘lighthouse glare’ turned upon him (The Good Soldier); here characters are seen and known in their entirety, in their complexity, and in this there is peace.Less
Developing the discussion of religion, this chapter compares Ford Madox Ford's fantasy novel, The Young Lovell (1913), with the poem ‘On Heaven’, written at the same period. It seeks the religious equivalent of the symbolic healing of women and investigates the peculiarly Fordian notion of peace. ‘Fantasies are scenarios of desire’, according to Peter Gay; they are ‘in touch with the deepest motions of the mind, principally its unmet needs’. In ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Sigmund Freud examines the often ordinarily sublimated extension of the childhood need for fantasy and play as expressed in creative writing. In The Young Lovell and ‘On Heaven’, Ford's desire, his fantasy, is to do with being seen. Not for these characters Dowell's ‘mortifying’ experience of having Leonora's ‘lighthouse glare’ turned upon him (The Good Soldier); here characters are seen and known in their entirety, in their complexity, and in this there is peace.
Sara Haslam
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060557
- eISBN:
- 9781781700099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060557.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
D. H. Lawrence's essay ‘Why the Novel Matters’ focuses on issues of communication and plurality as displayed by the effective novel. The relationship between Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford was ...
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D. H. Lawrence's essay ‘Why the Novel Matters’ focuses on issues of communication and plurality as displayed by the effective novel. The relationship between Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford was sometimes close, and at times was difficult. It began when Ford first published Lawrence in the English Review and ‘introduced him to literary London’. What is communicated in Ford's novels, and how? This chapter examines the resultant dramatic thrust of the contemporary Fifth Queen trilogy, the eye for colour, for detail, for patterns. The psycho-political geography of Ford's writing is thus confirmed in its period of relative certainty, especially when compared with the suicides of Edward and Florence in The Good Soldier and the suicide of Christopher Tietjens's father in Parade's End. These later novels are distinguishable from the Fifth Queen trilogy primarily due to their more complex interweaving of levels. As another manifestation of modernist fragmentation, one fomented by psychoanalysis and sexology, the four main characters are read partly as four parts of the same psyche, individually and oppositionally gaining (at times violent) expression.Less
D. H. Lawrence's essay ‘Why the Novel Matters’ focuses on issues of communication and plurality as displayed by the effective novel. The relationship between Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford was sometimes close, and at times was difficult. It began when Ford first published Lawrence in the English Review and ‘introduced him to literary London’. What is communicated in Ford's novels, and how? This chapter examines the resultant dramatic thrust of the contemporary Fifth Queen trilogy, the eye for colour, for detail, for patterns. The psycho-political geography of Ford's writing is thus confirmed in its period of relative certainty, especially when compared with the suicides of Edward and Florence in The Good Soldier and the suicide of Christopher Tietjens's father in Parade's End. These later novels are distinguishable from the Fifth Queen trilogy primarily due to their more complex interweaving of levels. As another manifestation of modernist fragmentation, one fomented by psychoanalysis and sexology, the four main characters are read partly as four parts of the same psyche, individually and oppositionally gaining (at times violent) expression.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety ...
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This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.Less
This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.
Sara Haslam
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060557
- eISBN:
- 9781781700099
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060557.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book is about Ford Madox Ford, a hero of the modernist literary revolution. Ford is a fascinating and fundamental figure of the time; not only because, as a friend and critic of Ezra Pound and ...
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This book is about Ford Madox Ford, a hero of the modernist literary revolution. Ford is a fascinating and fundamental figure of the time; not only because, as a friend and critic of Ezra Pound and Joseph Conrad, editor of the English Review and author of The Good Soldier, he shaped the development of literary modernism. But, as the grandson of Ford Madox Brown and son of a German music critic, he also manifested formative links with mainland European culture and the visual arts. In Ford there is the chance to explore continuity in artistic life at the turn of the last century, as well as the more commonly identified pattern of crisis in the time. The argument throughout the book is that modernism possesses more than one face. Setting Ford in his cultural and historical context, the opening chapter debates the concept of fragmentation in modernism; later chapters discuss the notion of the personal narrative, and war writing. Ford's literary technique is studied comparatively and plot summaries of his major books (The Good Soldier and Parade's End) are provided, as is a brief biography.Less
This book is about Ford Madox Ford, a hero of the modernist literary revolution. Ford is a fascinating and fundamental figure of the time; not only because, as a friend and critic of Ezra Pound and Joseph Conrad, editor of the English Review and author of The Good Soldier, he shaped the development of literary modernism. But, as the grandson of Ford Madox Brown and son of a German music critic, he also manifested formative links with mainland European culture and the visual arts. In Ford there is the chance to explore continuity in artistic life at the turn of the last century, as well as the more commonly identified pattern of crisis in the time. The argument throughout the book is that modernism possesses more than one face. Setting Ford in his cultural and historical context, the opening chapter debates the concept of fragmentation in modernism; later chapters discuss the notion of the personal narrative, and war writing. Ford's literary technique is studied comparatively and plot summaries of his major books (The Good Soldier and Parade's End) are provided, as is a brief biography.
Seamus O’Malley
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199364237
- eISBN:
- 9780199364251
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199364237.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter first argues that Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford Madox Ford’s First World War tetralogy Parade’s End, appropriates the plot and themes of Rebecca West’s The Return of the ...
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This chapter first argues that Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford Madox Ford’s First World War tetralogy Parade’s End, appropriates the plot and themes of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. Both works are early engagements with the formulation of shell-shock as a medical condition and are simultaneously theorizings of modernist historical practices. For Ford especially, traumatic amnesia becomes a model for a modernist historical narratology and an impressionist aesthetic: language cannot directly name historical objects, which instead must be “thought round,” to use the words of Ford’s protagonist Christopher Tietjens. Some Do Not . . . also suggests a place in historiography for amnesia and forgetting: the novel’s ellipses, nonlinearity, and radical use of indirect discourse, rather than distancing the text from history, actually pull intimately close to the process by which human memory becomes historical text.Less
This chapter first argues that Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford Madox Ford’s First World War tetralogy Parade’s End, appropriates the plot and themes of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. Both works are early engagements with the formulation of shell-shock as a medical condition and are simultaneously theorizings of modernist historical practices. For Ford especially, traumatic amnesia becomes a model for a modernist historical narratology and an impressionist aesthetic: language cannot directly name historical objects, which instead must be “thought round,” to use the words of Ford’s protagonist Christopher Tietjens. Some Do Not . . . also suggests a place in historiography for amnesia and forgetting: the novel’s ellipses, nonlinearity, and radical use of indirect discourse, rather than distancing the text from history, actually pull intimately close to the process by which human memory becomes historical text.
Nathan Waddell
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748647316
- eISBN:
- 9780748684380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647316.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In ‘Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club’, Nathan Waddell explores Ford’s post-war revisiting of the pre-war avant-garde party scene in his ...
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In ‘Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club’, Nathan Waddell explores Ford’s post-war revisiting of the pre-war avant-garde party scene in his reconstruction in The Marsden Case (1923) of a staging of an ombres chinoises at the Cabaret Theatre Club. The Club’s performance space, the Cave of the Golden Calf, fostered part-public, part-private activities away from a dismal ‘above-ground’ where ‘people were disagreeably odd and wearisome things had to be accounted for’. Ford’s return in The Marsden Case to an early modernist scene of revelry and hedonism is, in Waddell’s account, not so much a ‘frivolous avoidance of […] political anxieties’ as the recalling of a cultural era ‘whose cosmopolitan and intellectual underpinnings might point the way for a directionless post-war modernity’.Less
In ‘Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club’, Nathan Waddell explores Ford’s post-war revisiting of the pre-war avant-garde party scene in his reconstruction in The Marsden Case (1923) of a staging of an ombres chinoises at the Cabaret Theatre Club. The Club’s performance space, the Cave of the Golden Calf, fostered part-public, part-private activities away from a dismal ‘above-ground’ where ‘people were disagreeably odd and wearisome things had to be accounted for’. Ford’s return in The Marsden Case to an early modernist scene of revelry and hedonism is, in Waddell’s account, not so much a ‘frivolous avoidance of […] political anxieties’ as the recalling of a cultural era ‘whose cosmopolitan and intellectual underpinnings might point the way for a directionless post-war modernity’.
Charlotte Jones
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines Ford’s Parade’s End in comparison to Rebecca’s West’s earlier novella, The Return of the Soldier, exploring the different ways in which their respective protagonists ‘work ...
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This chapter examines Ford’s Parade’s End in comparison to Rebecca’s West’s earlier novella, The Return of the Soldier, exploring the different ways in which their respective protagonists ‘work through’ the psychological and emotional legacy of war. Opening with an initial survey of contemporary responses to the newly-emergent condition ‘shell shock’ – medical definitions, military classifications and the emerging field of psychoanalysis as theorised by Freud and W. H. R. Rivers – the chapter goes on to discuss Ford and West’s engagement with these discourses in their fiction as both attempt to imagine the possibilities for the reintegration of the mind after the return from war. It concludes by exploring the ways in which this paradigm of psychological trauma contributes to the authors’ literary modernism.Less
This chapter examines Ford’s Parade’s End in comparison to Rebecca’s West’s earlier novella, The Return of the Soldier, exploring the different ways in which their respective protagonists ‘work through’ the psychological and emotional legacy of war. Opening with an initial survey of contemporary responses to the newly-emergent condition ‘shell shock’ – medical definitions, military classifications and the emerging field of psychoanalysis as theorised by Freud and W. H. R. Rivers – the chapter goes on to discuss Ford and West’s engagement with these discourses in their fiction as both attempt to imagine the possibilities for the reintegration of the mind after the return from war. It concludes by exploring the ways in which this paradigm of psychological trauma contributes to the authors’ literary modernism.
Andrzej Gaşiorek
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199545810
- eISBN:
- 9780191803475
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199545810.003.0040
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter discusses the histories of Ford Madox Ford's the transatlantic review and Ezra Pound's The Exile. Both magazines sought to publish innovative work, which both Pound and Ford liked to ...
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This chapter discusses the histories of Ford Madox Ford's the transatlantic review and Ezra Pound's The Exile. Both magazines sought to publish innovative work, which both Pound and Ford liked to differentiate from ‘commercial’ writing. In practice, however, neither of them carried out this strategy in a programmatic fashion, since they both tended to follow their own tastes, published whatever they liked, and relied heavily on personal contacts. The main differences between them were that The Exile was a ‘closed shop’ and that Ford's editorial policy was in no sense dependent on considerations of gender, while Pound's was radically male-centred and exclusionist. Ford's desire to create a public sphere in which a variety of voices might productively commingle was inclusive, whereas Pound was bent on creating a new American civilization in which in at least one respect exclusive, male-centred, and misogynist.Less
This chapter discusses the histories of Ford Madox Ford's the transatlantic review and Ezra Pound's The Exile. Both magazines sought to publish innovative work, which both Pound and Ford liked to differentiate from ‘commercial’ writing. In practice, however, neither of them carried out this strategy in a programmatic fashion, since they both tended to follow their own tastes, published whatever they liked, and relied heavily on personal contacts. The main differences between them were that The Exile was a ‘closed shop’ and that Ford's editorial policy was in no sense dependent on considerations of gender, while Pound's was radically male-centred and exclusionist. Ford's desire to create a public sphere in which a variety of voices might productively commingle was inclusive, whereas Pound was bent on creating a new American civilization in which in at least one respect exclusive, male-centred, and misogynist.
Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism, and Psychology is a long-overdue examination of Ford’s First World War modernist masterpiece from the point of view of psychology and the ...
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War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism, and Psychology is a long-overdue examination of Ford’s First World War modernist masterpiece from the point of view of psychology and the effects of the war on the minds of those who fought and those at home. It adds to writing about First World War writers, war trauma and trauma theory, modernism, and literary Impressionism, and contributes to the burgeoning field of medical humanities by reconsidering Parade’s End in terms of the various mental and psychological disorders represented within its pages. War and the Mind is the first multi-authored study of Parade’s End that focuses on the psychological effects of the war, both upon Ford himself and upon his novel: its characters, its themes, and its form. The volume comprises ten chapters by experts on Ford, modernism, the First World War, and psychology. Issues discussed include Ford’s pioneering analysis of war trauma, trauma theory, shell shock, memory and repression, insomnia, empathy, therapy, literary Impressionism, and literary style. Other writers discussed include Conrad, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Freud, William James, W. H. R. Rivers, Sassoon, May Sinclair, and Rebecca West.Less
War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism, and Psychology is a long-overdue examination of Ford’s First World War modernist masterpiece from the point of view of psychology and the effects of the war on the minds of those who fought and those at home. It adds to writing about First World War writers, war trauma and trauma theory, modernism, and literary Impressionism, and contributes to the burgeoning field of medical humanities by reconsidering Parade’s End in terms of the various mental and psychological disorders represented within its pages. War and the Mind is the first multi-authored study of Parade’s End that focuses on the psychological effects of the war, both upon Ford himself and upon his novel: its characters, its themes, and its form. The volume comprises ten chapters by experts on Ford, modernism, the First World War, and psychology. Issues discussed include Ford’s pioneering analysis of war trauma, trauma theory, shell shock, memory and repression, insomnia, empathy, therapy, literary Impressionism, and literary style. Other writers discussed include Conrad, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Freud, William James, W. H. R. Rivers, Sassoon, May Sinclair, and Rebecca West.
Meghan Marie Hammond
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748690985
- eISBN:
- 9781474406376
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748690985.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter Four, “Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford,” uses the first work on aesthetic empathy in Britain, that of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme, to read Ford’s novels The Good Soldier ...
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Chapter Four, “Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford,” uses the first work on aesthetic empathy in Britain, that of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme, to read Ford’s novels The Good Soldier (1915) and A Man Could Stand Up– (1926). This chapter suggests that Ford’s work contains a reconciliation of the seemingly incompatible theories of Lee and Hulme. A reading of The Good Soldier shows how Ford’s narrator exhibits an empathic drive to metaphorise other minds that fits with Lee’s ideas, but also makes use of linguistic patterns that Hulme would understand as abstract, and therefore anti-empathic, to cultivate fellow feeling. A complementary reading of A Man Could Stand Up– focuses on empathy’s role in the representation of war, arguing that empathic experience mediated through abstraction becomes the only way to meet Ford’s impressionistic goal of rendering the effects of modern warfare on the mind.Less
Chapter Four, “Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford,” uses the first work on aesthetic empathy in Britain, that of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme, to read Ford’s novels The Good Soldier (1915) and A Man Could Stand Up– (1926). This chapter suggests that Ford’s work contains a reconciliation of the seemingly incompatible theories of Lee and Hulme. A reading of The Good Soldier shows how Ford’s narrator exhibits an empathic drive to metaphorise other minds that fits with Lee’s ideas, but also makes use of linguistic patterns that Hulme would understand as abstract, and therefore anti-empathic, to cultivate fellow feeling. A complementary reading of A Man Could Stand Up– focuses on empathy’s role in the representation of war, arguing that empathic experience mediated through abstraction becomes the only way to meet Ford’s impressionistic goal of rendering the effects of modern warfare on the mind.
