Ford Madox Ford A Dual Life: Volume II: The After-War World - Softcover

Saunders, Max

9780199668359: Ford Madox Ford A Dual Life: Volume II: The After-War World

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199668353 ISBN 13: 9780199668359

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

The second volume of Max Saunders's magisterial biography of Ford Madox Ford takes up the story from Ford's enlistment in the army and departure for France in 1916. Like its predecessor, The After-War World makes full use of previously unpublished and long-lost material. It is the first biography to establish Ford's importance to modern literature: exploring the relations between a writer's life, autobiography, and fiction, and showing how Ford's case challenges the conventions of literary biography itself. Saunders provides a ground-breaking reading of Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, and describes the founding of the transatlantic review, the influential literary journal that published Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Picasso, and many more major writers and artists.

Ford's personal relationships were no less complex than his work: while living with Stella Bowen after the breakup of his partnership with Violet Hunt he had a brief affair with Jean Rhys, but he was to spend his final years until his death in 1939, with the Polish American painter Janice Biala.

Throughout his career Ford endlessly reinvented himself, and this biography, for the first time, offers a sustained and critical account of his dazzling literary transformations.

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About the Author:

Max Saunders is Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Professor of English and Co-Director at the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King's College London.

Review:

Review from previous edition: "Max Saunders knows more about Ford Madox Ford than any other living person. He also understands him better than anyone else. His scrupulous and passionate biography will never be superseded."

--Julian Barnes

"magisterial biography ... It is a work of exemplary erudition, critical intelligence and sympathy."

--Times Literary Supplement 26/11/1996

"This is an outstanding Life and a major contribution to literary scholarship. This biography releases him from the casualty clearing stations in which he has been detained for so long and restores him to active literary service."

--Ian McIntyre, The Times 26/11/1996

"Saunders has produced a fine critical life which will be invaluable for all students of Ford's work and influence ... he has done a magnificent service to his subject in his thoughtful analysis of Ford's great tetralogy, Parade's End ... Saunders has produced a valuable academic work.
Thoughtful, lucid and scrupulously objective, he restores Ford to us as a brilliant, much-maligned man - and a major literary figure."

--Miranda Seymour, The Independent 26/11/1996

"Saunders has made a remarkable tribute to his subject, and his subject is irresistible."

--Adrian Wright, The Literary Review 26/11/1996

"it is admirable that OUP decided to give Saunders a full-sized canvas to work on ... he makes excellent use of it ... This is the account to which all students of Ford will turn first. A main attraction of this majestically complete, balanced and well-written biography is the lavish
quotation. This is a life which makes one want to go back to read, and re-read, Ford's works."

--John Sutherland, The Sunday Times 26/11/1996

"definitive and ample biography ... Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life is both meticulous to a fault and bright with insight"

--The Times Higher Education Supplement 05/12/1996

"Saunders's book is a serious and valuable interpretation which enables us to look at Ford's dual life with much greater complexity."

--The Guardian 19/12/1996

"No admirer of Ford Madox Ford will want to miss Max Saunders's two-volume ... about this extraordinary and complicated man. Saunders triumphantly establishes him as one of the most generous and influential figures of his time."

--Miranda Seymour, The Sunday Times 20/12/1996

"persuasive and immensely authoritative account of a man who has, for far too long, been overshadowed by his bitchy and thankless proteges"

--Miranda Seymour, The Independent 20/12/1996

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