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."

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 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. 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 has been adapted by Tom Stoppard for the BBC and HBO. Ford’s America, like the other places he wrote about extensively such as England or France, is a place of the imagination as much as the real place in which he lived and travelled. This volume is the first extended treatment of Ford’s lifelong contacts with American literature and culture. It combines contributions from British and American experts on Ford and Modernism. It has five closely inter-connected sections which display, between them, the range of Ford’s creative relationships with American writers and American territory. The first explores the transatlantic dimension of Ford’s modernism, from his involvement with Americans like James and Pound in Britain before the war, through the Paris days among the Americans in the transatlantic review circle such as Hemingway and Stein, to his time in America in the 20s and 30s, and the American care for his reputation after his death. The second section focuses on New York, and the publishing world portrayed in Ford’s only novel set mainly in the US, When the Wicked Man. A third section, discussing culture, politics, and journalism in his writing of the 1930s, is followed by two examples of his commentary on contemporary American culture, both published here for the first time. The final section juxtaposes two examples of the many American writers who have paid tribute to Ford: an essay tracking Robert Lowell’s regular recollections of his encounters with him; and Mary Gordon’s celebration of his life with the Polish-American painter Janice Biala. The volume also contains fourteen illustrations, including artwork by Biala and photographs of Ford.

Taking account of Ford Madox Ford’s entire literary output, this companion brings together prominent Ford specialists to offer an overview of existing Ford scholarship and to suggest new directions in Ford studies. The Routledge Research Companion to Ford Madox Ford is split into five parts, exploring the scholarly foundations of Ford Madox Ford studies, Ford's literary identity, Ford and place, specific case studies and themes and critical approaches. Within these five parts, the contributors cover areas relevant to Ford’s fiction, nonfiction and poetry, including reception history, life-writing, literary histories, gender and comedy. The Routledge Research Companion to Ford Madox Ford is an invaluable resource for students and scholars in Ford Studies, in modernism, and in the literary world that Ford helped shape in the early years of the twentieth century.