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Ford Madox Ford said of the year 1914 that it “seem[ed] to be cut in half” by the First World War (“Literary Portraits – LXIX”, 15). This phrase, one may argue, also largely applies to Ford’s personal timeline. Both his private life and his literary career were profoundly disrupted by the global conflict. In the early months of the First World War, Ford wrote prolifically about the future of literature and on a broader scope, of civilisation and human psychology; in his “Literary Portraits” that were published in Outlook, he showed remarkable prescience when it came to the consequences that the war would bear on the arts and on what he termed “the mind”. Yet when one examines the chronology of Ford’s non-fictional writing, and indeed of his literary work, one can sense a sharp dividing line that coincides with the moment when Ford enrolled in the British army in 1915, and was no longer a spectator from afar, but a direct witness of the unprecedented mass killing that was taking place on the front. His pre-war assertions gave way to questions; and as was the case with many other writers who took directly part in the hostilities, a decade elapsed before Ford succeeded in rendering his war experience in a novelistic form, through the Parade’s End tetralogy. This paper aims to examine Ford’s critical writing during the First World War, and to analyse the way in which he attempted to come to terms with the representational aporia that was triggered by his first-hand experience of battle. It focuses on Ford’s “Literary Portraits”; the pair of essays “A Day of Battle”, written in the Ypres Salient; “War and the Mind”, composed shortly after Ford’s return from the front; and the dedicatory letters to No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up—, and Last Post. These allow us to explore how the impressionist technique which Ford started to theorise before the war, came to be renewed and refined in his post-war writing, trying as it does to render the inexpressible experience of the war.

Although May Sinclair’s work has tended to be relegated to the periphery of modernism, Sinclair entertained close relationships with many major modernist figures such as Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West. A prolific novelist, Sinclair also wrote extensively on ways in which literature could participate in the modern movement, from the Brontë sisters to the Imagist poets, and is perhaps best known for first applying William James’s metaphor of the “stream of consciousness” to literary technique in her analysis of Dorothy Richardson’s first three instalments of Pilgrimage. Additionally, Sinclair’s intensely personal and dynamic critical style is itself a mindful exercise in a more innovative approach to criticism that proves akin to the modernist works that she tackles. Lastly, Sinclair’s criticism of her fellow modernist writers gives us a better insight into the innovation present in Sinclair’s own literary works, and into her career’s trajectory as it moved away from traditional realism to psychological realism. Examining Sinclair’s critical work thus allows us to establish the specificity of her perspective on modernist practices of writing and to re-examine the canons of modernism against the grain of what came to be the accepted definition of avant-garde writing.

Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford depicts the decay of a stable English national community during the Edwardian era. Ford renders the multifarious response of characters from the Establishment to the ideological changes concurrent with World War One. This article examines the way in which Parade’s End can be considered both as a State of England novel in its own right, and an ironical, detached, albeit nostalgic comment on this very genre. Englishness in Parade’s End is exposed as a construct that becomes synonymous with a parade, and is impossible to approach otherwise than peripherally. The concept’s negativity is deepened by the ironical perspective offered by the narration. Ultimately, the elusiveness of what is the central topic of the four novels has a direct effect on the status of the text itself. Parade’s End is an ungraspable novel because it tackles an ever elusive topic and refuses all attempts to fix its meaning.