Ford Madox Ford And The Misfit Moderns

Ford Madox Ford is a major figure of the modernist age, yet many of his works do not fulfil the expectations associated with the category of modernism. In Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns, the author examines the ways in which Ford, alongside other 'misfit moderns' (Richard Aldington, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, H.

G. Wells, and Rebecca West), destabilises the fundamental structures and forces that shape all narratives, from the processes of characterisation and plotting to the distinction between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, Ford exhibits a form of 'in-betweenness' that constitutes an exemplary responsiveness to the conditions of modernity whilst challenging many of our assumptions about early twentieth-century writing.

Offering original readings of Ford's Edwardian fiction and First World War writing, this book poses wide-ranging questions about the nature of narrative and the distinction between modernism and modernity. Review: Ford's works are notoriously resistant to conventional notions of genre, oblivious to the canonical distinctions between realism and modernism, or materialism and fantasy, or fiction and autobiography.

In this wide-ranging survey of the many ways in which Ford fails to 'fit' into the conventional categories of literary analysis, Rob Hawkes shows that the problem of how to appreciate Ford extends far beyond notions of genre to include fundamental elements of narrative itself. - Gene M. Moore, Ford Madox Ford Society newsletter 2013