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Call for papers
Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End:
Modernism and the First World War
Institute of English Studies, University of London
27–29 September 2012
‘There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great:
Parade’s End is one of them.’ W. H. Auden
Proposals are invited for an international conference on Ford Madox Ford’s First World War
tetralogy, Parade’s End. First published as Some Do Not . . . (1924), No More Parades (1925), A
Man Could Stand Up– (1926) and Last Post (1928), Parade’s End has been described by Anthony
Burgess as ‘the finest novel about the First World War’, by Samuel Hynes as ‘the greatest war
novel ever written by an Englishman’, and by Malcolm Bradbury as ‘a central Modernist novel of
the 1920s, in which it is exemplary’. In 2010–11, Carcanet published the volumes as major critical
editions, providing for the first time reliable texts, detailed annotations and discussions of the
textual histories. Also in 2011, the BBC and HBO embarked on a five-part adaptation, scripted by
Sir Tom Stoppard. As we approach the centenary of the start of the Great War, this conference will
examine and celebrate Ford’s First World War modernist masterpiece.
Keynote Address:
Adam Piette, author of Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939-1945 (1995) and The
Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (2009)
Special Guest:
Susanna White, BAFTA award-winning director of Parade’s End (2012, forthcoming), Bleak House (2005), Jane Eyre (2006), and Generation Kill (2008)
The conference aims to examine Parade’s End from a wide a range of critical, historical, and
theoretical perspectives. Possible topics might include:
- Parade’s End and modernism (including comparisons with other modernist novels)
- Parade’s End and the literature of the First World War (fiction, poetry, memoirs)
- Parade’s End and Ford’s other fictional and non-fictional war prose (such as No Enemy, The
Marsden Case, When Blood Is Their Argument, Between St. Dennis and St. George, and the
material collected in War Prose)
- Parade’s End and Ford’s War poetry
- The contexts of Parade’s End: class; women; marriage; family; bureaucracy; politics (radical
toryism, communism, and the suffrage movement); music hall; cinema
- The techniques of Parade’s End: style; narrative; point of view; time; memory; stream of
consciousness; character; humour; fairytale and romance; Literary Impressionism
- Influences on, and the influence of, Parade’s End
We are keen to receive proposals from graduate students as well as established scholars, and we
especially welcome papers discussing Parade’s End in relation to other writers’ works, including
(but not limited to): Richard Aldington; Henri Barbusse; Vera Brittain; Edmund Blunden; H.D.;
John Dos Passos; T. S. Eliot; Robert Graves; Graham Greene; Ernest Hemingway; David Jones;
James Joyce; D. H. Lawrence; Wyndham Lewis; Frederic Manning; R. H. Mottram; Marcel Proust;
Erich Maria Remarque; Siegfried Sassoon; May Sinclair; Rebecca West; Virginia Woolf. Speakers
will be invited to submit papers for publication in International Ford Madox Ford Studies vol.
13, which will be published in 2014 to mark the centenary of the outbreak of WWI.
Please send proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers to the conference organisers Rob
Hawkes and Ashley Chantler (fordmadoxford@hotmail.co.uk) by 1 May 2012.
Download the call for papers in PDF format
http://fordmadoxford-conference.weebly.com
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