This essay explores how masculinity is portrayed in The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford) and Women in Love (D.H Lawrence), and how Victorian and Edwardian masculinity ideals impact the friendships between the characters John Dowell and Edward Ashburnham and Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. The novels portray how hegemonic masculinity in Edwardian Britain changed from one type of masculinity, based on physical dominance, to include another, which drew on expert knowledge, capitalism and rationalism. In the texts, these masculinities are buttressed by the comparison to a male Other. In The Good Soldier, Edward Ashburnham stands for the ideals connected to dominance through his roles as landlord and soldier, and he is depicted as the “manlier” character in comparison to John Dowell. The same kind of coupling is found in Women in Love, where Gerald Crich represents both older ideals of dominance and newer ideals of expertise and rationality and Rupert Birkin is the relational opposite. Both Rupert Birkin and John Dowell are categorized as “not man” in the texts in order to emphasize that Edward Ashburnham and Gerald Crich are the “real” men. However, when the “manlier” characters have died both John Dowell and Rupert Birkin perpetuate masculine ideals, either by emulating hegemonic ideals or by redefining them. Furthermore, the Victorian and Edwardian conceptions of masculinity and male friendship inhibit the characters from forming emotionally close friendships. In both texts, emotional intimacy is portrayed as precarious and a more impersonal from of friendship that entails loyalty to a group or cause, camaraderie, is preferred.

This study presents an attempt to understand the political and aesthetic relationship between two of Modernism’s most enigmatic authors, Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford by examining their novelistic practice in light of their writings on politics and social criticism. A close look at the use of ironic distance, a hallmark feature in our understanding of modernist fiction, in Tarr (1918) and The Good Soldier (1915) reveals both authors conscious effort to distance themselves from their novel’s subjects, Fredric Tarr and John Dowell respectively. In light of both novels’ satirical element, a scathing attack on bourgeois narcissism caused by the wealthier class’ persistent attempts to identify with hollow and self serving social roles through the sham-aristocratic prestige created by England’s pre-war commodity culture, and the fact that both Fredric Tarr and John Dowell are artist figures that somehow resemble their creators, this project reinterprets Ford and Lewis’ ironic distance as an instance of self-distanciation. From this we can infer that both Ford and Lewis were invested in the modernist idea of impersonality, not just as a artistic or literary technique, but as the artist’s only means of escaping the narcissistic and slothful trap of modern subjectivity, and that, along with the production of modernist art, they saw a continual self-effacement as the price of authenticity, therefore inspiring in them the conviction to live as “uncelebrated stylists.”

This study presents an attempt to understand the political and aesthetic relationship between two of Modernism’s most enigmatic authors, Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford by examining their novelistic practice in light of their writings on politics and social criticism. A close look at the use of ironic distance, a hallmark feature in our understanding of modernist fiction, in Tarr (1918) and The Good Soldier (1915) reveals both authors conscious effort to distance themselves from their novel’s subjects, Fredric Tarr and John Dowell respectively. In light of both novels’ satirical element, a scathing attack on bourgeois narcissism caused by the wealthier class’ persistent attempts to identify with hollow and self serving social roles through the sham-aristocratic prestige created by England’s pre-war commodity culture, and the fact that both Fredric Tarr and John Dowell are artist figures that somehow resemble their creators, this project reinterprets Ford and Lewis’ ironic distance as an instance of self-distanciation. From this we can infer that both Ford and Lewis were invested in the modernist idea of impersonality, not just as a artistic or literary technique, but as the artist’s only means of escaping the narcissistic and slothful trap of modern subjectivity, and that, along with the production of modernist art, they saw a continual self-effacement as the price of authenticity, therefore inspiring in them the conviction to live as “uncelebrated stylists.”

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Ford Madox Ford est un écrivain impressionniste qui se veut historien de son temps et paraît représenter la vie moderne grâce à un texte envisagé à partir du visuel pour faire voir. Il encourage ainsi le rapprochement de son écriture avec l’art des peintres français du XIXème siècle, mais il engage dans ses récits une multitude d’arts et d’esthétiques afin de produire son impression suivant sa pensée originale et singulière. Celle-ci soutient l’accumulation et l’association artistiques mises en œuvre dans les romans en brisant les cadres esthétiques établis pour fusionner arts et esthétiques dans une forme qui s’adapte au réel afin d’en structurer l’informe et de le révéler pour en offrir une expérience au lecteur. Soumis au pictural et au théâtral pour se donner à voir dans des tableaux et des scènes, le récit dévoile en fait comment la modernité résiste à l’illusion mimétique. Peinture et théâtre figurent donc non le visible mais sa perte, et les romans sont poussés par leur objet à la dé-figuration proprement moderne que l’esthétique fordienne promeut et que le cinéma porte. Celui-ci donne alors accès à la vision d’un monde fragmenté et en mouvement par sa totalisation dans la métamorphose continue du filmique, qui en outre invite l’identification visuelle. Mais le cinématographique n’ouvre pas à la totalisation du roman, ni à ce dialogue que l’auteur entend engager avec son lecteur sym-pathique pour lui transférer son œuvre. Ce transfert se fait bien par le texte et sa structure mais en définitive hors de la figuration, grâce à la musique du roman qui à la fois gouverne, rassemble et abolit la représentation, les arts et le texte pour faire com-prendre l’œuvre. / Ford Madox Ford is an impressionist writer who purports to be a historian of his own time and seems to represent modern life in a text conceived visually to make you see. He thus encourages a parallel between his writing and the nineteenth-century French painters’ art to be drawn ; yet he draws on a vast array of arts and aesthetics in his narratives to forge his impression according to his original and singular conception of art. That conception supports the artistic accumulation and association exercised in the novels while it shatters established aesthetic frameworks to merge arts and aesthetics in a form which adapts to reality to structure its formlessness and reveals it to offer an experience of it to the reader. In obeying pictorial and theatrical norms to be seen as pictures or in scenes, the narrative in fact discloses how modernity resists mimetic illusion. So painting and the theatre do not represent visibility but its loss, and the novels are forced by their object to embrace a thoroughly modern de-figuration which Fordian aesthetics endorses and the cinema realises. The latter then grants access to the vision of a fragmented and moving world totalled by the continuous metamorphosis of film, which besides encourages visual identification. However the cinema does not lead to the totalisation of the novel, nor to the dialog which the writer intends to have with his sympathetic reader in order to transfer his artwork onto him. That transfer does happen by means of the text and its structure but ultimately without figuration, through the music of the novel which at once governs, unites and abolishes representation, the arts and the text so the artwork be com-prehended.

This thesis explores the citation of documents in the modernist novel. From contracts to newspaper articles, telegrams to reports, documents are invoked as interleaved texts in ways that, to date, have not been critically interrogated. I consider a range of novels, including works by Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Willa Cather, which are selected, in part, as a litmus of Anglo-American modernism, though they can more productively also be understood as coalescing around the example set by Joseph Conrad. Replete with allusions to documents, Conrad’s oeuvre is developed across the thesis as a meta-commentary on the document in modernist literature. In placing the document at the centre of analysis, and in using Conrad as a diagnostic of the document in modernity, the manifold ways in which authors use interpolated texts to perform denotative and connotative “work” in their narratives emerge, with the effect of revising our understanding of documents. These authors reveal the power of mass produced documents to lay claim to novelistic language; the historical role of documents in reifying inequality; on the level of narrative, the thematic potential of the document as a reiterable text; and finally, the capacity of the document, in its most depersonalized form, to realize social collectivity and community. This project therefore asks us to rethink and relocate the document as central to the modernist novel.

Ford often wrote about virtuous gentlemen ruined by the modern society he saw developing around him. While Ford Madox Ford was writing The Good Soldier, ther was a sense of displacement in England and the class system was starting to crumble. Edward Ashburnham, one of the two male protagonists in The Good Soldier, is described as a Chevalier Bayard and there are definitely some similarities between Ashburnham and Bayard. For instance, both men lived during periods of great societal change and both faithfully served their countries. However, the feudal lifestyle that was appropriate for Bayard in the fifteenth-century is unavailable to Ashburnham in the twentieth-century. In The Good Soldier, Ford used the old ideals of chivalry and courtly love codes to produce a character, Edward Ashburnham, who represents the loss of traditional values in a modern society.

This thesis addresses the literary representation of food in the period from 1900 through 1945 in the work of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Taking up nineteenth-century fascinations with sensual and aesthetic taste, these authors explore the implications of food preparation and consumption in Britain, America and France. They use representations of everyday culinary practices as a way to examine articulations of anxiety about the state of civilization, a fear that is amplified and altered by both World Wars. The thesis approaches the question of the significance of food to literary modernism in two ways. The first is a theoretical analysis of modernist ways of thinking about the dialectic between the concepts of civilization and barbarism. The second is grounded in material history, establishing the contexts and conditions of food culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on sociological thinking from Norbert Elias's conception of the civilizing process and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction, and using a combined methodology of close reading, biographical and historical analysis, I show that food acts as a lens for these authors' ideas about civil society and modernity. My original contribution to knowledge is threefold. The first is my interpretation of 'culinary Impressionism' as an extension and repositioning of current scholarly thinking about Ford's literary Impressionism. The second is my reading of Stein's and Toklas's jointly-authored cookbook draft as evidence of their collaboration. This forms the crux of my argument about Stein adapting domestic culinary techniques into her other writing. The third is in my chapter on Virginia Woolf. My original archival research shows that in A Room of One's Own Woolf's representation of the financial and culinary difference between men's and women's dining in colleges at the University of Cambridge is justified and the material inequality was in fact worse than previously understood. I argue that the disparity in institutional food intensifies Woolf's later reimagining of the term 'civilization' in Three Guineas. While drawing on the work of modernist studies scholars on modernism and the everyday, civilization, and food, my project is unique in demonstrating that food reflects modernist conceptions of civilization and barbarism. My thesis contributes to the understanding of transatlantic aesthetics and gendered productions of modernism by illuminating the centrality of agriculture, cookery, domestic work and institutional dining to modernist authors.

Modernists have expressed their views on literature in various ways. Ford Madox Ford’s Ladies Whose Bright Eyes seemingly participates in a discussion regarding the value of imagination in contrast to reason. This thesis argues that Ford Madox Ford’s Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, revised 1935) represents the imagination in ways that suggest that the value of the imagination is greater than the value of reason in order to show the transformative power of literature. The novel’s treatment of the imagination has didactic implications for teaching literary interpretation and for fostering a joy of reading. The present thesis aims to explore how the novel treats the imagination by connecting the novel to modernist discussions of the imagination in Wallace Stevens’ “Imagination as Value” (1951) and Stevens’ “The Irrational Element in Poetry” (1936) as well as to Ford’s essay on literary impressionism “On Impressionism” (1914). The thesis expands upon Max Saunders’ argument that the protagonist, Sorrell, is transformed into a man of imagination. The literary analysis is structured around Sorrell’s transformation, from a rational man living in blissful ignorance of the world of imagination to a man of imagination instructed by Dionissia on living with the imagination in the rational world, through faith. A joy of reading and autonomous reading motivation can be fostered by providing students with choice, cognitively challenging tasks related to commenting on and analysing the novel, and by training students to use quotes via the use of reading logs. The novel’s indirect treatment of the imagination suggests the transformative power of literature, which makes fostering a joy of reading seem all the more important as it may provide students with a gift that will last long after their school years are over.