Ford Madox Ford and Englishness

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BRILL, 2006 M01 1 - 292 páginas
The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. International Ford Madox Ford Studies has been founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is 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’. These works, together with his trilogy The Fifth Queen, about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, are centrally concerned with the idea of Englishness. All these, and other works across Ford’s prolific oeuvre, are studied here. 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. His trilogy England and the English (of which this forms the first part) provides a central reference-point for this volume, which presents Ford as a key contributor to Edwardian debates about the ‘Condition of England’. His complex, ironic attitude to Englishness makes his approach stand out from contemporary anxieties about race and degeneration, and anticipate the recent reconsideration of Englishness in response to post-colonialism, multiculturalism, globalization, devolution, and the expansion and development of the European Community.
Ford’s apprehension of the major social transformations of his age lets us read him as a precursor to cultural studies. He considered mass culture and its relation to literary traditions decades before writers like George Orwell, the Leavises, or Raymond Williams. The present book initiates a substantial reassessment, to be continued in future volumes in the series, of Ford’s responses to these cultural transformations, his contacts with other writers, and his phases of activity as an editor working to transform modern literature. From another point of view, the essays here also develop the project established in earlier volumes, of reappraising Ford’s engagement with the city, history, and modernity.
 

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Contenido

General Editors Preface
9
Introduction
13
The Saving Remnant
21
Ford and the Adventure Story Tradition
37
Fords First Trilogy
47
Ford Among the Aliens
63
The Impressionistic Rendering of Englishness in Fords Fifth Queen Trilogy
83
Romance History and Myth in Fords Fifth Queen Novels
97
Englishness and Work
177
A Modernist Elegy to the Gentleman? Englishness and the Idea of the Gentleman in Fords The Good Soldier
195
The Decline of English Discourse and the American Invasion in The Good Soldier and Parades End
211
Ford Madox Fords Englishness as Translated into German in Some Do Not and No More Parades
225
The Rash Act and Henry For Hugh
235
History Identity and Nationality in Fords Great Trade Route
243
Fords Poetry 18931921
255
Contributors
275

Ford Madox Ford and the English Literary Myth
119
The Englishness of The English Review
137
Fords English Trilogy and The Good Soldier
147
Ford and First World War Propaganda
163
Abstracts
279
Abbreviations
287
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