Ford, Ford Madox. (1873 - 1939).
W o r k
- founded The English Review (1908) for both established and new writers
- founded The Transatlantic Review (1920s) for modern literature
The Fifth Queen (1907 - 1908):
- a decoratively ornate trilogy of historical novels
- concerned with Catherine Howard, the beheaded wife of Henry VIII
The Critical Attitude (1911):
- a series of polemical essays on the state of the novel
- contrasts the ‘loose, amorphous, genial and easy-going’ British novel x the tighter and more self-consciously artful French novel
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915):
- his fictional masterpiece
- provisionally entitled The Saddest Story x but: renamed The Good Soldier as a more appropriate title for a novel to appear in wartime
- uses Conradian shifts in time and perceptions of betrayal, Jamesian concern with the subtleties of overlapping relationships and emotions
Parade’s End: Some Do Not… (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928):
- a post-war tetralogy concerned with the gradual break-up of the traditional squirearchical values
- the protagonist: an unhappy lover, a largely unsuccessful soldier, and neurotic survivor after the war’s end
- begins his post-war career as a restorer of antiques x but: still tries to make sense of the battered old world, now essentially fragmented
Quote
"It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me."
From The Good Soldier (1915).
Basics
(Picture: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Ford Hermann Hueffer. Penname Ford Madox Ford. (1873 - 1939). British. -
Work
Novelist. Critic. Author of The Good Soldier (1915). -
Genre
Modern fiction.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.