Description
Book SynopsisThe controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. He is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade’s End, which was adapted by Tom Stoppard for the acclaimed 2012 television series, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. This volume marks the centenary of The Good Soldier, with eighteen essays by established experts and new scholars. It includes groundbreaking work on the novel’s narrative technique, chronology, and genre; plus pioneering work considering the treatment of bodies and minds; eugenics; poison; and surveillance. Innovative comparative studies discuss Ford’s novel in relation to Henry James, Violet Hunt, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Jean Rhys, David Jones, and Lawrence Durrell.
Table of ContentsCONTENTS Introduction MAX SAUNDERS SECTION 1: NARRATIVE, CHRONOLOGY, GENRE The Good Soldier: Ford’s Postmodern Novel CATHERINE BELSEY July 4 to August 4: Paradigmatic and Palimpsestic Plots in The Good Soldier MELBA CUDDY-KEANE The Good Soldier and the Problem of Compositional (Un)Reliability EYAL SEGAL From Disfigured to Transfigured Past: Memory and History in The Good Soldier ISABELLE BRASME ‘It is Melodrama; but I Can’t Help It’: Dowell’s Melodramatic Imagination ROB HAWKES Screening The Good Soldier JANET HARRIS SECTION 2: MIND/BODY, CARE, TREATMENT Dowell and Dopamine: Information, Pleasure and Plot SARA HASLAM The Case of The Good Soldier MAX SAUNDERS Affairs of the Heart: Illness and Gender Subversion in The Good Soldier ELIZABETH BRUNTON Caring to Know: Narrative Technique and the Art of Public Nursing in The Good Soldier BARRY SHEILS ‘Rabbiting On’: Fertility, Reformers and The Good Soldier PAUL SKINNER The Good Soldier: A Tale of Poison. Lethal Little Bottles in the Work of Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt VENETIA ABDALLA SECTION 3: CONTEXTS AND CONTRASTS ‘Early Kipling Told by Henry James’: A Reading of The Good Soldier HARRY RICKETTS Anglo-German Dilemmas in The Good Soldier, or: Europe on the Brink in 1913 JULIAN PREECE ‘The End is Where We Start from’: Spatial Aspects of Retrospection in The Good Soldier and In Parenthesis CARA CHIMIRRI Good People and Chorus Girls: The Notion of Respectability in The Good Soldier and Quartet NAGİHAN HALİLOĞLU Love’s Knowledge: Realisation Beyond Defence: Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet After, and Beyond, Ford’s The Good Soldier OMAR SABBAGH ‘Don’t You See?’: Surveillance and Utopian Tranquillity in The Good Soldier PETER MARKS Contributors
