A voir: Blog consacré à The Good Soldier, par Guillaume CINGAL, maître de conférences en littératures de langue anglaise à l'Université François-Rabelais. Il se propose de tenir le carnet de route de son cours de CAPES-agrégation consacré au roman de Ford Madox Hueffer, The Good Soldier.

General information

A short biography of FMF on the Bloomsbury Research Centre site

Ford Madox Ford on the Wikipedia site

Autobiography, Biography and Ford Madox Ford's Women by Ros Pesman (Women's History Review, 1999)

Read The Good Soldier online

The Inheritors, an Extravagant Story by Joseph Conrad and FMF (1901) on the Gutenberg site

A Review of The Inheritors by L.J. Hurst

FMF's Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford (1927)

A biography of FMF on Books and Writers

An Overview of FMF's life and works

 

Critical articles

Saunder's "Ford Madox Ford: a Dual Life" reviewed by Giovanni Cianci (.pdf file)

International Ford Madox Ford Studies

Themes, Motifs and Symbols in The Good Soldier, the Context, important quotations explained and study questions and essay topics (from Spark Notes)

The Good Soldier, a Tale of passion by Sara Haslam on the Literary Enclopedia site

"Ford's Training" by Sara Haslam (Open University)

A review of Sara Haslam's Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War by Richard Greaves (Liverpool Hope University College)

The Good Soldier, a Betrayal, a review by Dan Callahan (on Culturedose.net)

A Lecture (abstracts only) by Dr Andrew Radford

Short Annotations on the novel (Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database site)

From a 2003 Graduate Symposium
Emilie Brand Manhart (excerpt only): "'You can't understand: How could you?': Fragmented Narration and Moral Ambiguity in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness"
"Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad wrote three novels in collaboration from 1901 to 1909, and came to several agreements about narrative style that influenced both their collaborative sork and their independently written novels. They both adopted fragmented, overlapping impressionistic narrative styles which demand intense involvement on the part of the reader, and employed these techniques in The Good Soldier and Heart of Darkness, the two novels I will discuss. While Charlie Marlow and John Dowell may set out to tell their stories in order to understand their effects on them personally, neither conlcude their stories with any clarity. As a result, the reader gains no clarity either. Ford and Conrad's point, I believe, is not to force a reader to answer difficult questions, but to ask them. The complex and fragmented narrative style of both stories, even though the plots are incredibly different, lead to a very similar effect. Readers are left to wonder about morals, about responsible behavior, and about whether all individuals are susceptible to temptation as Kurtz and Ashburnham are. I will argue that Conrad and Ford purposefully convolute the narrative sequencing of their novels in order to engage the reader in an active collaboration, forcing the reader to question his/her own sense of right and wrong. The ambivalence about the characters, this uncomfortable confusion about morality, reality, and responsibility felt by the reader is exactly the point of Ford's and Conrad's novels."

Nicole Harris, "Pre-Story: Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier as Text in Transition" (excerpt only)
When Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier first appeared, it was met with varied reviews, some celebrating its originality, others condemning its lack of plot. This lack of plot (as plot is traditionally understood) provides an important focal point in this paper, which looks at traditional ideas of story structure from three perspectives: contemporary book reviewers', a contemporary critic's, and a modern critic's. What these perspectives seem to indicate is that The Good Soldier is not a "novel" despite its similarities to one--its length, its characters, its narration.
This paper concedes that the text lacks a "story" (the fundamental, traditionally-structured backbone of a traditionally conceived novel) and then attempts to theorize what exactly The Good Soldier is and how it manages to satisfy readers despite its lack of form. The process of storytelling must be considered holistically. Because Ford constructs Dowell as narrator of his own past, Dowell's story exists before he tells it; the same may be said of any story. In the process of presenting a chronological narrative, a narrator much establish which events are mention-worthy and which are irrelevant. This process is referred to in this paper as chronological causality and is considered "an entirely retrospective phenomenon."
Ford uses Dowell's recollections and frequent self-contradictions to demonstrate the process of establishing chronological causality rather than, as most texts do, revealing its product in what has become traditional story form. Critics have formulated a chronology, or what might be called a post-text, by ordering the events in the text; this post-text does, in fact, constitute a "story." But the fact that anyone other than Dowell can construct his life's story demonstrates a separation from the story itself that Ford, I posit, was unwilling to accept. If Ford believed, as a modern critic states, that the artist's responsibility is to portray reality without judging it, then surely The Good Soldier manages this in its complication of the straightforward storytelling process and its insistence on demonstrating the more realistic process of pre-story.

 

Miscellaneous

From the description of a course on Modernism (by Dr. Christoph Henke, University of Augsburg): "Abstraction, alienation, change, individualization, acceleration of life - these are some of the characteristics of European urban life at the beginning of the 20th century as experienced by contemporary artists and intellectuals. World War I added to all this a profound sense of trauma and disillusionment as to the consequences of technical modernization and scientific progress. Moreover, art - as most other social fields - saw a rapid development of differentiation and specialization, which was spearheaded by an avant-garde exploring and experimenting with new forms of expression that would accommodate the experience of modern life. It was a time of extreme aesthetic self-consciousness, which resulted in many movements and manifestos that, rather than condemning the negative effects of modern life on human consciousness, celebrated the potential for a new departure in art.
Modernist literature in England is part of this pan-European development, although it took expatriates from North America (such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis) and Irish outsiders (such as James Joyce and W. B. Yeats) to introduce modernist innovations to English literature, while the epicentre of European modernism soon moved away from London to Paris. In this seminar, we will approach English literary modernism by discussing selected poetry and novels from the time. In addition, participants are requested to obtain their own copies of the novels by Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier; 1915), James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; 1916), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse; 1927).

A few quotations from the novel

Essay topics
Character Analysis of an Anti-hero
Morality in The Good Soldier
Narrative Perspective and Time in The Good Soldier
Unreliable Narration in The Good Soldier
Being and Appearance in The Good Soldier

 

More bibliographical elements

Armstrong, Paul B. The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987
Andreach, R. J. The Slain and Resurrected God: Conrad, Ford and the Christian Myth. New York, 1970.
Auden, W. H. “Review of Parade’s End.” Mid-Century, 22 (February 1961), 3-10.
Bradbury, Malcolm. “The Denuded Place: War and Form in Parade’s End and USA”. In Holger Klein (Ed.). The First World War in Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan,1976. 193-209.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London: Oxford UP, 1977.
Gordon Jr., Ambrose. The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford. Austin, Texas: 1964.
Green, Robert. Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Judd, Alan. Ford Madox Ford. London: Collins, 1990.
Moore, Gene. “The Tory in the Time of Change: Social Aspects of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End”, Twentieth Century Literature, 28:1 (Spring 1982), 49-68.
Moser, Thomas C. The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980.
Radford, Andrew. ‘The Gentleman’s Estate in Ford’s Parade’s End’, Essays in Criticism 52: 4 (October 2002), 314-332.
Snitow, Ann Barr. Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984.
Tate, Trudi. “Rumour, Propaganda, and Parade’s End.” Essays in Criticism, 47: 4 (October 1997): 332-353.
Trotter, David. “Hueffer’s Englishness.” Agenda, 27: 4, 28: 1 (1992), 148-155.
Galef, David. “Forster, Ford, and the New Novel of Manners.” In John Richetti (Ed.) The Columbia History of the British Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 818-841.
Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Levenson, Michael. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.
Ford Madox Ford by Richard A. Cassell (1961)
Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art by R.W. Lid (1964)
The Limited Hero in the Novels of Ford Madox Ford by Norman Leer (1966)
The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford by F. McShane (1965); Ford Madox Ford by C.G. Hoffman (1967)
The Saddest Story by A. Mizener (1971)
Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford, ed. by R.A. Cassell (1987),
The Art of Ford Madox Ford by Kenneth Bendiner (1997)
Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal, ed. by Robert Hampson and Tony Davenport (2001) Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: The Collaborative Texts

Selected works by Ford Madox Ford

* The Brown Owl, 1891
* The Feather, 1892
* The Shifting of the Fire, 1892 (with J. Conrad)
* The Questions at the Well, 1893 (as Fenil Haig)
* The Queen Who Flew, 1894
* Ford Madox Ford, 1896
* The Cinque Ports, 1900
* Poems for Pictures and Notes for Music, 1900
* The Inheritors, 1901 (with J. Conrad)
* Rossetti, 1902
* Romance, 1903 (with J. Conrad)
* The Face of Night, 1904
* The Benefactor, 1905
* The Soul of London, 1905
* Hans Holbein, 1905
* The Heart of the Country, 1906
* Christina's Fairy Book, 1906
* The Fifth Queen, 1906
* Privy Seal, 1907
* From Inland, 1907
* An English Girl, 1907
* The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1907
* The Spirit of the People, 1907
* The Fifth Queen Crowned, 1908
* Mr. Apollo, 1908
* The "Half Moon," 1909
* Songs from London, 1910
* A Call, 1910
* The Portrait, 1910
* High Germany, 1911
* Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, 1911 (rev. ed. as Daniel Chaucer, 1935)
* The Simple Life Limited, 1911 (as Daniel Chaucer)
* The Critical Attitude, 1911
* Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections, 1911
* The New Humpty-Dumpty, 1912 (as Daniel Chaucer)
* The Panel, 1912 (rev. ed. Ring for Nancy, 1913)
* Collected Poems, 1913
* Henry James, 1913
* The Desirable Alien, 1913 (with V. Hunt)
* The Young Lovell, 1913
* Mr. Fleight, 1914
* Antwerp, 1914
* Between St. Dennis and St. George, 1915
* When Blood is their Argument, 1915
* The Good Soldier, 1915
* Zeppelin Nights, 1916 (with V. Hunt)
* translation: The Trial of Barbarians by P. Loti, 1917
* On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service, 1918
* A House, 1921
* Thus to Revisit, 1921
* Mr. Bosphorus and the Music, 1923
* The Nature of Crime, 1923 (with J. Conrad)
* The Marsden Case, 1923
* Women and Men, 1923
* Some Do Not, 1924
* Joseph Conrad, 1924
* No More Parades, 1925
* A Man Could Stand Up, 1926
* A Mirror to France, 1924
* New Poems, 1927
* New York Essays, 1927
* New York Is Not America, 1927
* Last Post, 1928
* A Little Less Than Gods, 1928
* No Enemy, 1929
* The English Novel, 1929
* When the Wicked Man, 1931
* Return to Yesterday, 1931
* The Rash Act, 1933
* It Was the Nightingale, 1934
* Henry for Hugh, 1934
* Provence, 1935
* Vive le Roy, 1936
* Mightier Than the Sword, 1937
* The Great Trade Route, 1937
* The March of Literature, 1938
* Critical Writings, 1964
* Letters, 1965
* Buckshee, 1966
* Your Mirror to My Times, 1971
* The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, 1962-1971 (5 vols.)
* Pound / Ford, 1982
* The Ford Madox Ford Reader, 1986
* A History of Our Own Time, 1988
* The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, 1993