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.

This monumental novel, divided into four separate books, celebrates the end of an era, the irrevocable destruction of the comfortable, predictable society that vanished during World War I.

The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford At the fashionable German spa town Bad Nauheim, two wealthy, fin de siecle couples - one British, the other American - meet for their yearly assignation. As their story moves back and forth in time between 1902 and 1914, the fragile surface propriety of the pre - World War I society in which these four characters live is ruptured - revealing deceit, hatred, infidelity, and betrayal. "The Good Soldier" is Edward Ashburnham, who, as an adherent to the moral code of the English upper class, is nonetheless consumed by a passion for women younger than his wife - a stoic but fallible figure in what his American friend, John Dowell, calls "the saddest story I ever heard."

In the book "The English Novel," Ford Madox traces the development of the literary genre of the novel from the earliest times to the death of Joseph Conrad. Ford pays a lot of attention to the origin and the laws of development, and the potential of the novel as a genre.

No Enemy, written between The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade's End (1919) was not published until 1929 in New York. It is vintage Ford, neglected in part because of its publishing history, in part because it falls between the stools of fiction and autobiography.

Ford's evocation of the growth of London, of the bewildering variety of the city scene by day and night, of the glamour and frivolity of its 'high' life and the hardship of its working people is a work of imaginative literature, not a guide book. Other writers had explored the 'facts' of London, but for Ford impressions take the place of information and argument. Part history, part personal reminiscence, and part prose poem which renders 'the moods of many individuals' in relation to the urban landscape, The Soul of London reads at times like fiction where the scene is set for characters who never appear. But it is also a journey of discovery into the nature of modern city life and our ways of coming to terms with it.

Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant, unconventional mathematician, is married to the dazzling yet unfaithful Sylvia, when, during a turbulent weekend, he meets a young Suffragette by the name of Valentine Wannop. Christopher and Valentine are on the verge of becoming lovers until he must return to his World War I regiment. Ultimately, Christopher, shell-shocked and suffering from amnesia, is sent back to London. An unforgettable exploration of the tensions of a society confronting catastrophe, sexuality, power, madness, and violence, this narrative examines time and a critical moment in history.

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. This volume marks the seventieth anniversary of Ford's death. Its focus is how his work engages with visual culture. He wrote criticism, biography, and reminiscences about the Pre-Raphaelite artists he'd been brought up amongst - Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and in particular his grandfather Ford Madox Brown. But his art-writing ranges much more widely, from Holbein to Cézanne and Matisse. Ford came to advocate Impressionism in literature. In London before the First World War he got to know avant-garde artists like Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and wrote about modern visual art movements, such as Futurism, Vorticism and Cubism. This work is discussed, not just in terms of what it tells us about art, but for what it reveals about the development of Ford's own practice as a writer, and of his critical ideas. After the War he lived in France with two painters, first the Australian Stella Bowen, then the American Janice Biala, and moved in the Modernist art circles of Picasso, Juan Gris, Gertrude Stein and Brancusi. This volume includes sixteen new essays by critics and art historians on Ford's engagement with the rapidly transforming visual cultures of his era, which break new ground discussing his writing about visual arts, and how it affected his fiction, poetry and criticism. Among numerous illustrations are several portraits of Ford by Janice Biala reproduced for the first time. Also published here for the first time are generous extracts from Biala's marvelous letters from the 1930s about Ford.

Preliminary Material -- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS -- GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE /Max Saunders -- INTRODUCTION /Laura Colombino -- FROM PAINT TO PRINT - GRANDFATHER'S LEGACY /Angela Thirlwell -- FORD MADOX FORD'S ART CRITICISM AS A RESERVOIR FOR HIS NARRATIVE POETICS /Vita Fortunati -- FROM PRE-RAPHAELISM TO IMPRESSIONISM /Max Saunders -- IMAGE-MUSIC-TEXT: FORD AND THE IMPRESSIONIST LYRIC /Ashley Chantler -- TO COOK, OR TO PAINT, IN PARIS?: FORD IN COLOUR /Sara Haslam -- VISUALITY VS. TEMPORALITY: PLOTTING AND DEPICTION IN THE FIFTH QUEEN AND LADIES WHOSE BRIGHT EYES /Rob Hawkes -- THE PORTRAIT: FORD'S CHEF-D'ɶUVRE INCONNU /Gene M. Moore -- FORD MADOX FORD'S LITERARY PORTRAITS /Anna Viola Sborgi -- FORDING HOLBEIN /Martin Stannard -- SKULL/BRAIN DRAIN STAIN (THE AMBASSADORS) /guy mannes-abbott -- 'IF WE SHADOWS HAVE OFFENDED': THE METAPHOR OF SHADOW IN THE MARSDEN CASE /Jenny Plastow -- A MAP OF TORY MISREADING IN PARADE'S END /Mark Conroy -- MODERNITY, SHOCK AND CINEMA: THE VISUAL AESTHETICS OF FORD MADOX FORD'S PARADE'S END /Alexandra Becquet -- FORD, BOWEN, AND ITALIAN ART /Joseph Wiesenfarth -- FORD + BIALA: A LONG AND PASSIONATE DIALOGUE /Jason Andrew -- FORD, MATISSE AND THE BOOK OF THE DEAD: THE (IN)VISIBLE OBJECTS OF THE RASH ACT AND HENRY FOR HUGH /Laura Colombino -- CONTRIBUTORS -- ABSTRACTS -- ABBREVIATIONS.