<p>Most critical studies of Ford are largely general in nature, mainly because of the comprehensive, 'pioneering' positions critics have tended to adopt in order to show that Ford is indeed worthy of our attention. As a result, the major novels and romances --the three volumes of Fifth Queen (1906, 1907, 1908), The Good Soldier (1915), and the four volumes of Parade's End (1924, 1925, 1926, 1928) --still need the kind of close, textual analysis that would demonstrate their value as subtle and intricate works of art. In this study, I have attempted to provide a detailed examination of these works.</p> <p>Perceiving an additional 'flaw' in most evaluations of these fictions, whereby form and content are discussed as separate entities, I have focused, instead, on the "rhetoric" of the novels --on the ways in which we are made to see Ford's fictional worlds. Seen through the perspectives afforded by Scharer's "Technique as Discovery", Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction and Lodge's Language of Fiction, this theoretical framework is discussed in the opening chapter. By focusing upon rhetoric as being an integral part of the process by which we are moved to a unique view of experience, I try to illuminate some of the "enigmas" surrounding the selected fictions, as well as counter many of the negative criticisms that have hitherto appeared.</p> <p>In my chapter on Fifth Queen, I argue that the rhetoric Ford there employs is designed to fully explore the romance form. By focusing upon the range of effects in the trilogy, we see that, contrary to its general reputation, Fifth Queen is not a structure without unity, but a unified "song" of the romance heroine who seeks to give a shape to experience through a faith in something outside the self. The other characters in the trilogy fail to respond to Katherine's qualities, and the rhetorical effects Ford employs bring out their failings and Katherine's triumph of selfhood. These failings are especially noticeable in Henry VIII who is incapable of the kind of love which would take him beyond his own limitations. In many ways, ·the contrast between Henry's imprisonment in his "passions" and "prides", and Katherine's freedom through a love for something outside the self, is a pattern repeated throughout Ford's work.</p> <p>Any consideration of the rhetoric of The Good Soldier must deal with the narrator Ford uses to tell his "Tale of Passion". I show how the values or norms we are made to see as of importance in the novel are precisely those which help the narrator tell his tale. This is particularly true of the most important value, passion. Passion enables Dowell, as faith does Katherine, to transcend the self in order to escape its constraints; as a consequence, he can see things from another point of view. It also allows him to give experience a form, and, through this creative act, he finds a degree of self-awareness and freedom. Passion is the value he comes to see as being the sentiment that Edward Ashburnham tried hardest to express. It is the sentiment that Leonora fails to understand. However, Dowell does understand passion and the "affair" as a whole; as a result, he comes to align himself with the "passionate" who are destroyed by a "garrison" mentality that denies anything exceptional in life.</p> <p>Passion is also the subject of Parade's End, and the value which lies behind its telling. Approaching the novel through its rhetoric, I show how the tetralogy is a unified work, of which the much maligned fourth volume, The Last Post, is an integral part. The sequence of volumes is structured in such a way that it explores various kinds of passion: those that are destructive and imprison the characters involved, and those that are creative and are seen as a source of life. We, as readers, experience these passions, and the shaping of our experience depends upon Ford's successful handling of his medium--especially his use of character, point of view, juxtaposition, language, time and setting. I analyses these aspects of the novel's rhetoric by tracing them through the entire fabric of the tetralogy. There emerges an excellent depiction of passion which is the equal of The Good Soldier.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)