Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Misfit Moderns

   • Rob Hawkes

   Pages 1-22

3. Personalities of Paper: Character, Justification, and Narrative Space

   • Rob Hawkes

   Pages 23-58

4. Casting Back: Plotting, Impressionism, and Temporality

   • Rob Hawkes

   Pages 59-98

5. Fictionality at the Front: Genre, Trust, and the War Memoir

   • Rob Hawkes

   Pages 99-136

6. Destruction/Reconstruction: Narrative, Shell Shock, and the War Novel

   • Rob Hawkes

   Pages 137-163

7. Back Matter

   Pages 164-196

   PDF

Ford Madox Ford is a major modernist writer, yet many of his works do not conform to our assumptions about modernism. Examining ways in which he, alongside other 'misfit moderns', undermines 'stabilities' we expect from novels and memoirs, this book poses questions about the nature of narrative and the distinction between modernism and modernity.

• fiction
• Modernism
• Narrative
• novel
• space
• British and Irish Literature

“Rob Hawkes’s Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War is an impressive and ambitious book. … Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns is a provocative book.” (Randi Saloman, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38 (4), 2015)

“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, Issue 19, 2013)

“...Hawkes offers a valuable addition to Ford criticism and to modernist criticism in general by virtue of his strong emphasis on the narrative practices of misfit moderns and on those practices' destabilizing effects.” (Wyatt Bonikowski, Suffolk University, Modernism/modernity, Vol. 20 (3), September, 2013)

“This book will be of use to those both studying and researching the period. It provides useful definitions of key terms, and, with well-chosen comparator texts, offers a new critical framework for reading Ford and his companion misfit moderns.” (Dr Sara Haslam, The Open University, UK)

ROB HAWKES is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University, UK. He has taught previously at Leeds Trinity University, the University of East Anglia and the University of York.

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