Brita Lindberg-Seyersted's 'Ford Madox Ford and His Relationship to Stephen Crane and Henry James'

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-41
Author(s):  
Helle Porsdam
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Stephen Crane ◽  
Ford Madox Ford

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Hydraulics and Heroics: William James and Stephen Crane

Prospects ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 215-235
Author(s):  
William Wasserstrom
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
New World ◽  
William James ◽  
Stephen Crane ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
The Golden Bowl ◽  
European Women

Unquestioning faith in an equilibrium of stasis: it is this flaw of temperament, this European fault of social and moral intelligence that separates European women from their American counterparts in nineteenth-century literature. Particularly in Henry James's fiction women of distinctively New World bearing, young women bred to combine stamina with delicacy of spirit, stubbornness with flexibility, reared to disavow perfectly held balances in favor of riskier angles of poise—James's exemplary women conduct their lives along lines of equilibrium more flowing than European, less stiff by far, lines and angles that parallel the mode and style and history of the society they embody, a society shaped at hazard and given to gamble. It is indeed in his masterwork, The Golden Bowl, a fatidic text anticipating which myth of order would shape American high style during the industrial age, that James devised a program intended to discredit stasis and extol movement without forswearing form. In descent as well as dissent from a Swedenborgian father, both Henry James and his brother William endorsed a creed of “vital equilibrium.” And this American ideology presupposed the existence or cultivation of a self galvanized by “balance/imbalance,” a dynamics of tension which provides a constant feature of motive in our classic literature.

The Strange Irregular Rhythm: An Analysis Of The Good Soldier

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-509
Author(s):  
Elliott B. Gose
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Henry James ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theodore Dreiser ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Novel ◽  
Literal Truth ◽  
Good Soldier

In his appreciative portrait of Theodore Dreiser, Ford Madox Ford recorded how in 1914, long before they ever met, he had read with emotion Dreiser's novel, The Titan, and then had written a laudatory review of it. Six months later in this country Dreiser read Ford's new novel, The Good Soldier, also with emotion and also to write a review. Here the similarity ends, however, for Dreiser was irritated by Ford's novel and especially by the portrayal of John Dowell, an expatriate from Philadelphia in “the United States of North America” (p. 60). This character, claimed Dreiser, “is no American. He is that literary packhorse or scapegoat,” the “Englishman's conception of an American husband.” In a sense this is quite true. No American would make the comment that Dowell does in analyzing his wife: “She did not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking” (p. 79). Obviously such a conception, if taken as an attempt to state the literal truth about this country, must have sounded to a contemporary reader as though its author's acquaintance with America were limited to the novels of Henry James. Actually, of course, as an impressionist novel The Good Soldier does not intend to give a literal representation of the problem it explores. And since, as Ford emphasized in his portrait, he and Dreiser were temperamentally different, we should not be surprised at Dreiser's irritation or his final complaint that the novel as a whole is “cold narrative and never truly poignant” because the “formal British leanings” of the author “will not let him loosen up and sing.”

Henry James and Ford Madox Ford: A Troubled Relationship

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-191
Author(s):  
Joseph Wiesenfarth
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Ford Madox Ford

Fictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Blacklock
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
George Macdonald ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Chapter 6 considers how cultural conceptions of space had been shifted by higher spatial thought in its various forms and how this was reflected in the popular and literary fiction of the fin de siècle. Investigating the production of space in fin de siècle literature, it focuses on embodiment, the senses, and particularly narrative voice and mood. A newly configured spatiality that owes its conception to higher space becomes a driving force behind certain techniques of narrative fiction in the period and plays directly into Modernism. This chapter builds on earlier observations on things as mediating objects and on the philosophy of space to develop a widescreen vision of higher space that explores its reciprocal relationship with colonial space in the fiction of H.G. Wells, George MacDonald, George Griffith, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and others.

Portraits from Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Boyd Maunsell
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Central Focus

Portraits from Life examines the ways in which a group of major Modernist writers—Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, H. G. Wells, and Edith Wharton—depicted themselves and each other in their memoirs and autobiographies, rather than in their fiction. In a series of reconstructions of biographical contexts, it reveals how each of these novelists approached the task of writing their own lives, and how they experimented with the form and style of autobiography. Memoirs and autobiographies, as this book argues, are often just as artful as novels. Showing how it is impossible to understand any author’s autobiography without an understanding of their life, this book offers a group portrait examining the temptations, difficulties, and benefits which the project of writing their lives brought these novelists. The act of writing autobiography is a central focus, and many recurring themes are analyzed: how autobiography is often a collaborative act; how the time of the writing of autobiography often has a major influence; how fact and fiction, biography and autobiography, interact; how autobiography is always mediated by memory. This book argues that autobiography is as much an act of group portraiture as of self-analysis. It shows how the keeping of biographical secrets acts to protect others rather than oneself; and it explores the ethical issues at stake in autobiography when dealing with real, rather than invented, people. It also opens up a rich network of Modernist encounters, examining how these seven writers’ memoirs interrelate.

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