sarah haslam (ed.). Ford Madox Ford and the City. International Ford Madox Ford Studies, 4. Pp. 245. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005.
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 230 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/res/hgl064
ISSN1471-6968
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoPrevious volumes of the Ford Madox Ford Society's annual conference have concentrated on its subject's less familiar books, his modernity and his engagement with history. This, the fourth in the series, maintains a high standard. Collections of conference papers routinely meet with reviews suggesting dogs’ breakfasts and curates’ eggs but, while it is true that there is some repetition here and an occasional loss of focus, no serious Ford scholar can ignore this book. Most of the 13 critical essays are stylishly argued and, in addition, we have for the first time two essays by Ford (‘Boston’ and ‘Denver’) rescued from Cornell's archive, and a third (‘Take Me Back to Tennessee [Nashville]’) that has only appeared once: in Vogue during the 1930s. All three were intended to form part of a book, Portraits of Cities, that was left incomplete at Ford's death in 1939. The primary texts dealt with are Ford's early poetry in The Questions At the Well (1893), The Face of the Night (1904) and High Germany (1912); his mature verse in On Heaven and Poems Written on Active Service (1918), and in Buckshee (1931); The Soul of London (1905); An English Girl (novel, 1907); ‘The Future in London’ (essay, 1909); Mr Bosphorus and the Muses (1923); A Mirror to France (1926) and New York Is Not America (1927). The cities dealt with, then, are London, New York and Paris, in all of which Ford lived and worked. The secondary texts provide a trail of intriguing connections, looking at both the roots and the shaping of Ford's conception of the city amid the slowly crystallising canon of Modernism. Roots are seen in Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), Ford Madox Brown's painting ‘Work’ (1852–65), Conon Doyle, Arthur Symons's London Nights (1897), Stoker's Dracula (1897), George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (1888). Fellow city-watchers are Conrad in The Secret Agent (1907), Henry James in The Golden Bowl (1905) and The American Scene (1906), Balzac, Flaubert, Jean Rys in The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927)—and, of course, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in, respectively, The Waste Land (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). Perhaps not surprisingly, it is in the discussion of Eliot and Woolf that the volume tends briefly towards the bottom of the lecture-drawer. The commentary here is perfectly sensible but the ground is so well-tilled that we might have been spared following that plough again. The bulk of this volume, however, deals with many works by Ford that most readers will never have encountered and makes a good case for them.
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