Publisher's Synopsis
Of all Ford Madox Ford's critical works, The English Novel (first published in 1930) is his most complete and satisfying. He tells us that he wrote it largely while travelling: memory with its passions and rejections plays a great part. It certainly does not smell of the lamp or the library: we should not look here for close readings or for absolute fidelity to fact. Instead, we follow our guide -- himself one of the great innovative novelists of the century -- as he takes us on a rapid, clarifying tour of the dominant literary form of the age, from its birth to his own time.
Ford's comments are those of a man with an acute appreciation of the novel form, its development and potential. especially pertinent is his radical criticism of the nineteenth-century novel and his championing of Flaubert and Conrad. His association and collaboration with Conrad make the passages on the author of Nostromo (to which he contributed certain passages) some of the most compelling in the book.
Ford insists that what he offers are 'suggestions not dictates'. His book does not espouse an orthodoxy: it urges a fresh reading of what he has identified as the best work in our (European) tradition, with pointers in unexpected directions. Though the book is almost seventy years old, it remains compulsively readable. 'In perusing this sort of book,' Ford writes, 'the reader must be prepared to do a great deal of the work himself -- within his own mind.' A definite critic in his sure understanding of technique, his taste and his perception of directions in literature are vivid and suggestive.
The volume is part of The Millennium Ford project which aims to bring all the major writings of this great writer back into circulation. See also pages XX, XX and XX of this catalogue.
