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History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings.
WIESENFARTH, Joseph (Ed.)
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2004, XI, 241 pp.
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Series:
International Ford Madox Ford Studies 3
“…a valuable and thought-provoking volume.”
Literature and History, Vol.15, No.2, 2006
"excellent scholarship but also critical experiment and essays from those beyond academe . . ."; "Criticism now [sees Ford] as a crucial figure of European modernism or as a proto-postmodernist".
Martin Stannard, Studies in the Novel, 39:1 (Spring 2007), 105-13
"[Ford’s] writing of history extends through fictional narrative into historical study, literary history, impressions or reminiscences of people and places, and even outright propaganda. With good reason does Saunders claim in his preface that 'the representation of history is for [Ford] also a matter of the history of representation.' . . . the best essays . . . demonstrate how theorization can give Ford's remarkably diverse writing renewed vigor."
Terry Caesar, English Literature in Transition, 49:1 (2006), 79-81
"The peculiar strength of this volume is the welcome stress it places on the trilogy about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen, and how Ford's artistic concern with the relationship between fiction and historical romance foreshadows postmodern conceptions of historiography and narrative form."
Julian Cowley, Year’s Work in English Studies (2006)
History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings explores the idea of history across various genres: fiction, autobiography, books about places and cultures, criticism, and poetry. ‘I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time’, wrote Ford. The twenty leading specialists assembled for this volume consider his writing about twentieth-century events, especially the First World War; and also his representations of the past, particularly in his fine trilogy about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen. Ford’s provocative dealings with the relationship between fiction and history is shown to anticipate postmodern thinking about historiography and narrative. The collection includes essays by two acclaimed novelists, Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Judd, assessing Ford’s grasp of literary history, and his place in it.
CONTENTS
Max SAUNDERS: General Editor’s Preface
Joseph WIESENFARTH: Introduction
Patrick PARRINDER: ‘All that is solid melts into air’: Ford and the Spirit of Edwardian England
Peter G. CHRISTENSEN: Contrasting ‘Condition of the Country’ Novels: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago
Anne Marie FLANAGAN: Poised ‘between anger and irony’: Ford’s Representation of Lady Mary
Anthony P. MONTA: Parade’s End in the Context of National Efficiency
Vita FORTUNATI: The Impact of the First World War on Private Lives: A Comparison of European and American Writers (Ford, Hemingway, and Remarque)
Paul SKINNER: The Painful Processes of Reconstruction: History in No Enemy and Last Post
Jonathan BOULTER: ‘After . . . Armageddon’: Trauma and History in Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy
Dominique LEMARCHAL: Ford’s Paradoxical Development of the Personal Tone in the Writing of Propaganda
Elena LAMBERTI: Writing History: Ford and the Debate on ‘Objective Truth’ in the Late 20th Century
Jason HARDING: The Swan Song of Historical Romance: The Fifth Queen Trilogy
Sara HASLAM: The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh: A Fordian History of Self-Construction (or: Where Is [M]other?)
Alan JUDD: Using Ford in Fiction
James M. SCANNELL: History or Quickie History: Elections in Anthony Trollope and Ford Madox Ford
Robert E. McDONOUGH: Mister Bosphorus and the Muses: History and Representation in Ford’s Modern Poem
Angus WRENN: Henry, Hueffer, Holbein, History and Representation
Max SAUNDERS: Critical Biography: Rhetoric, Tone and Autobiography in Ford’s Critical Essays
Harriet Y. COOPER: The Duality of Ford’s Historical Imagination
Andrzej GASIOREK: ‘In the Mirror of the Arts’: Ford’s Modernism and the Reconstruction of Post-war Literary Culture
Nicholas DELBANCO: An Old Man Mad about Writing
The Contributors
Abbreviations
JOSEPH WIESENFARTH is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written extensively on Ford and on the English novel. His book Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) includes a chapter on Parade’s End. He was guest editor for the special issue, on ‘Ford Madox Ford and the Arts’, of Contemporary Literature, 30:2 (Summer 1989).His edition of Jane Austen's The Three Sisters will be published by the Juvenilia Press (Sydney, Australia, 2004); and his study Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2005.
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