"Ford Madox Ford and the City assembles fourteen pioneering essays, by new as well as established European and American scholars, exploring Ford's representations of real and ideal cities, across the full range of his work, from his earliest verse, to his post-war prose and poetry of the 1920s and 1930s."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

The correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate, extending from 1929 to the time of Bishop's death in 1944, embraces the period of the Great Depression and the coming of World War II. In that richly eventful period in the development of American literature, these two men of letters were continually exchanging news and comment about the activities, opinions, successes, and misadventures of poets, novelists, critics, publishers, and editors; about expatriate Americans in Europe and the quickening intellectual life of New York; and about the Agrarian movement and what was later to be called the Southern Renascence. Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Katherine Anne Porter, Maxwell Perkins, Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Scott Fitzgerald—all are subjects of comment, both personal and artistic. The respect and affection of both writers for Edmund Wilson survived their vehement political differences with him, and their exchange of literary criticism, advice, and encouragement with Wilson continued unabated. The letters record a warm and steady friendship, as well as a literary relationship in which Tate—though the younger man—is clearly the mentor. The freedom with which Tate and Bishop discuss their work in progress, and the care and candor with which they comment on one another's poems and stories, offer the reader of this carefully edited correspondence revealing glimpses of the creative process and the reality of the American "republic of letters" in their time.

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.

A critical biography of the great modernist editor and novelist. Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) lived among several of the most important artists and writers of his time. Raised by Pre-Raphaelites and friends with Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, Ford was a leading figure of the avant-garde in pre-WWI London, responsible for publishing Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. After the war, he moved to Paris, published Gertrude Stein, and discovered Ernest Hemingway. A prolific writer in his own right, Ford wrote the modernist triumph The Good Soldier (1915) as well as one of the finest war stories in English, the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–1928). Drawing on newly discovered letters and photographs, this critical biography further demonstrates Ford’s vital contribution to modern fiction, poetry, and criticism.

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.