Ford, Ford Madox (1873-1939)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Frayn
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Review Journal ◽  
Northern France ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Unreliable Narration ◽  
Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford was a British author of German ancestry (he was born Ford Hermann Hueffer), a novelist, poet, editor, critic, biographer, and memoirist. Under his editorship (1908/9) the English Review journal was an influential organ of early modernism, although a commercial failure. He is perhaps best known for The Good Soldier (1915), a classic tale of unreliable narration and psychological intrigue. Ford served in the Great War, and his masterful Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–8) draws on this experience as he develops the modernist techniques and metaphors used in The Good Soldier to rethink the conflict. Ford continued to write novels, literary criticism and history, travel literature, and memoirs until the end of his life. He died in northern France in 1939.

Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of ‘Sacrifice’ in the Great War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Sherry
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Major Point ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Official Record ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Point Of Reference

This essay engages the values, attitudes, and practices of ‘sacrifice’ in the cultural history and literary and visual representations of the Great War (discussing works by Richard Aldington, David Jones and Ford Madox Ford). It demonstrates how extensively the idea of sacrifice was appealed to in the official record, and it shows how this political construction was responded to, almost always critically and negatively, in a literature of major record. The chief ideas turn around the fact that a sacrificial victim, in order to be effective, needs to be ‘worth’ a good deal; this calculation is profoundly altered in the ongoing, increasingly wholesale character of slaughter in the war. This disenchantment provides a major point of reference for our understanding of the war as a watershed in European and world-cultural history.

Rural Reconstruction in Aisne after the Great War

Rural History ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-185
Author(s):  
Hugh Clout
Keyword(s):  
Rural Settlement ◽  
Great War ◽  
Rural Land ◽  
Present Discussion ◽  
Northern France ◽  
Common Problems ◽  
Post War ◽  
Financial Transactions ◽  
The Great War

Generations of scholars have analysed and interpreted the events of the Great War which wrought havoc across landscapes of ten départements in northern France (figure 1). By contrast, the processes whereby these areas were restored in the immediate post-war years have received very little attention, although the desperate circumstances in which recovery took place have been powerfully evoked in Bertrand Tavernier's recent film La vie et. rien d'autre (1989). Common problems were encountered throughout the devastated regions but just as the intensity of damage varied between départements so did the speed and efficiency of reconstruction and recovery. Rather than attempting to embrace the revival of urban or industrial life or to explore the complex financial transactions which made all forms of reconstruction possible, the present discussion focuses on the dual imperative of restoring rural land and rebuilding rural settlement within a single département.

After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern France after the Great War

1997 ◽  
Vol 163 (3) ◽  
pp. 300
Author(s):  
Michael Heffernan ◽  
Hugh Clout
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Northern France ◽  
The Great War

Bridge over the Abyss?

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-136
Author(s):  
Norman Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Great War ◽  
Northern France ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Way

The Ligue des droits de l’homme had several German interlocutors in the 1920s, ranging from the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM) to the German Foreign Office to German public opinion. The leadership of the DLfM cosseted French republican opinion in the belief that all of Germany wanted to pay reparations for the destruction of northern France during the Great War, but there was hardly unanimity even within the German republican left on the issue of war guilt and reparations. The tangible political ramifications of the war guilt debate are to be seen, above all, in the fallout from the Ruhr Occupation of 1923 which could have destroyed the burgeoning relationship of the LDH and DLfM, but did not. It did, however, change the way France and the Ligue were viewed in Germany.

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