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For its centenary this volume originally re-examines some well-known issues surrounding The Good Soldier (1915) and its \"mad about writing\" author. The dialogue between established and young Ford scholars produces a challenging kaleidoscope of insights.

Fragmenting Modernism 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 century, as well as the more commonly identified pattern of crisis in the time. The argument throughout 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. Fragmenting Modernism will be useful for anyone studying the literature of the early twentieth century, impressionism or modernism in general terms, as well as for those who seek to investigate in detail one of the great polymorphous figures of the time.

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. Modernist periodicals and editorial theory have been very productive areas in recent research. This volume focuses on Ford and editing. Ford was one of the greatest editors of Modernist magazines. He founded the English Review in Edwardian London, publishing Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. His editorial relationships with all of these writers are examined in detail here, as are those with Jean Rhys, Ernest Hemingway, and Basil Bunting, connected with the transatlantic review launched by Ford in post-war Paris, which also carried experimental work by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Tristan Tzara. These seventeen essays bring together distinguished scholars and poets, as well as younger experts on Modernism and its magazine culture. This collection provides a wealth of new research on the management, cultural politics, and editorial stance of Ford's magazines; on the impact of his editorial contacts on his own and others' work; and on editorial approaches to his writing, including his best-known novels, The Good Soldier and Parade's End.

In Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford approaches the experience of trauma in an unusual way—it is no longer just past experiences, but the expectancy of dismal events that become as traumatic. Ford chooses worry for such rendering. In order to make the correlation between suffering and sensibility, he places worry in the lives of his characters, which reflects on Ford’s own life. This discussion will introduce the idea that worry is going to be a major component of Ford’s psychologising of war. I explore this worry-driven sensibility and the ways it is reflected, especially in the characters’ obsession with the anticipation of death and face-forward mourning. Within this loss-filled atmosphere, worry over being killed dominates the narrative and continually feeds the sentiment of mournfulness. The Great War transforms into a Greater War, seeping into the societal realm, where it amplifies the private emotional battles of the characters, centred around worry. Consequently, the narrative highlights the coexistence of these personal and public conflicts, ultimately resulting in both physical and psychological losses throughout the story.

The standard image of First World War soldiers is of men in open trenches: waiting to attack or be attacked; walking, sitting, sleeping, dead. Ford’s Parade’s End includes such scenes. But it is a different kind of image which predominates in his war writings and often produces its most memorable passages: images of houses or house-like shelters. The mind seeks protection in such structures; but they offer little security against the destructiveness outside, against the bombardments, gas, shrapnel, bullets. Ford wrote that the experience of war revealed: ‘men’s dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. … all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields […]’. This realisation works in two ways. The soldier’s sense of vulnerability provokes fantasies of home, solidity, sanctuary, while for the returnee soldier, domestic architecture summons war-visions of its own annihilation: ‘it had been revealed to you’, adds Ford, ‘that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos’. It is now customary to read war literature through trauma theory. Building on analyses of Ford’s use of repression, but drawing instead on object relations theory, I argue that Ford’s houses of war are not screen memories but images of the failure of repression to screen off devastating experiences. The abysses of Chaos can be seen through the screen or projected upon it. Attending to Ford’s handling of this theme enables a new reading of his war writing and a new case for its coherence. The essay will connect the opening of No More Parades (in a hut, during a bombardment) with the war poem ‘The Old Houses of Flanders’; the postwar poem A House; the memoir It Was the Nightingale (quoted above); and the otherwise puzzling, fictionalised memoir No Enemy, structured in terms of ‘Four Landscapes’ and ‘Certain Interiors’.

Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud’s concept of the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives, Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade’s End, The Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self, drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations between self and other.

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.

This article analyses together, for the first time, Ford Madox Ford’s short stories about the First World War. A surprisingly unfamiliar form for Ford, who valued allusion, subtlety, and omission as narrative devices, we see in these stories his first attempts to parse his experience of wartime and, subsequently, military service. It is also an aspect of Ford’s writing which has received little previous critical comment. The wartime and post-war short stories are approached chronologically: ‘The Scaremonger: A Tale of the War Times’ (1914), ‘Fun!—It’s Heaven’ (1915), ‘Pink Flannel’ (1919), ‘The Colonel’s Shoes’ (1920), ‘Enigma’ ([1920–1922] 1999), and ‘The Miracle’ (1928). The contemporary debates in which Ford intervened are highlighted by returning to their original periodical publications, and extensive reference to a range of his non-fictional periodical contributions establishes new connections among his wartime writing. Here I bring together for the first time these short stories, arguing that Ford’s refracting of the war through the lens of his impressionism is distinctive as an early response to war, trauma, and neurosis and is vital to the genesis of his later successes in prose, notably the Parade’s End novel tetralogy (1924–1928).

In an essay written sometime in 1917 or 1918, unpublished during his lifetime and only discovered in 1980, Ford Madox Ford reflects on what his war experience in France taught him: “above all things—humility”. This article argues that Ford’s writing about humility and perspective-taking in his wartime essays, which he connects to unstinting attentiveness to the particularities of place and people, can be read through an ecocritical lens that sees an ecological humility as central to reorienting human relationships within the natural world. In reflecting on both the lessons of war and the causes of such conflicts, Ford highlights humility in terms of perspective-taking and, in a related move, foregrounds the necessity for the precise use of language—both he sees as key to representing and preventing war. In so doing, I argue, Ford calls for an aesthetics and an ethics of war writing. Such literature must realize the impossibility and hubris of the bird’s-eye view, instead rooting itself in the ground, both literally and linguistically, while using a precise language that emerges from a clear awareness of this limited perspective.

This essay adopts a stylistic approach to delineate the various—and varying—pragmatic effects inherent in the use and interactions of pronouns in Ford’s war prose. Ford’s singular use of pronouns is shown to be instrumental in his practice of literary impressionism. In particular, the omnipresent second person is granted a variety of referents that coexist along a “continuum of reference” (as defined by Bettina Kluge), from a “you” that is speaker-oriented to one that is addressee-oriented. Sorlin’s intersection of Kluge’s continuum with a gradient from personalisation to generalisation (2022) is illuminating when examining the manifold significance of Ford’s use of the second person, as it brings to light its ethical impact. Ford’s war essays shift from the general to the particular and from the collective to the individual in a manner that opposes propaganda rhetorics. Furthermore, the gradient established by Sandrine Sorlin to account for the pragmatic effect of “you” also proves remarkably useful when applied to the pronoun “one”. Scrutinising the interplay between these various pronouns allows us to investigate the multifarious relationships that Ford establishes in his war essays between the persona, the reader, those he often called “my men”, and the collective ethos of wartime Britain.