Parade's End
Encyclopedia
Parade's End is a tetralogy
(four related novels) by Ford Madox Ford
published between 1924 and 1928. It is set mainly in England
and on the Western Front
in World War I
, where Ford served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life vividly depicted in the novels.
In 1998, the Modern Library
ranked Parade's End 57th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In December 2010, John N. Gray hailed it as "possibly the greatest 20th-century novel in English". In 2011 HBO, BBC and VRT announced a tv adaptation
written by Tom Stoppard
and starring Benedict Cumberbatch
and Rebecca Hall
.
(1924), No More Parades
(1925), A Man Could Stand Up --
(1926), and Last Post
(or The Last Post in the U.S.A.) (1928). They were combined into one volume as Parade's End, which has been ranked at number 57 on the Modern Library
's 100 Best Novels
list.
It has been adapted for television by Sir Tom Stoppard for the BBC, and is due to be broadcast in 2012.
, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. The two central novels follow Tietjens in the army in France and Belgium, as well as Sylvia and Valentine in their separate paths over the course of the war.
More detailed summaries are given on the separate pages for each of the novels: follow the links in the section above.
controversially omitted Last Post from his Bodley Head edition of Ford's writing, calling it "an afterthought which he (Ford) had not intended to write and later regretted having written. Greene went on to state that "...the Last Post was more than a mistake—it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade's End." Certainly Last Post is very different from the other three novels. It is concerned with peace and reconstruction, and Christopher Tietjens is absent for most of the narrative, which is structured as a series of interior monologues by those closest to him. Yet it has had influential admirers, from Dorothy Parker and Carl Van Doren to Anthony Burgess and Malcolm Bradbury (who also included it in his 1992 Everyman edition). The first annotated and critical edition of the novels, edited by Max Saunders, Joseph Wiesenfarth, Sara Haslam, and Paul Skinner, was published by Carcanet Press in 2010-11.
Auden, W. H., ‘Il faut payer’, Mid-Century, no. 22 (Feb. 1961), 3-10.
Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, third edition (Manchester: Carcanet: 1996).
Bradbury, Malcolm, ‘Introduction’, Parade's End (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992).
Brown, Dennis, ‘Remains of the Day: Tietjens the Englishman’, in Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, no. 2, ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA.: Rodopi, 2003), 161-74.
Calderaro, Michela A., A Silent New World: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (Bologna. Editrice CLUEB [Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria, Editrice Bologna], 1993).
Cassell, Richard A., Ford Madox Ford: A Study of his Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962).
Gordon, Ambrose, Jr, The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1964).
Gasiorek, Andrzej, ‘The Politics of Cultural Nostalgia: History and Tradition in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End’ Literature & History, 11:2 (third series) (Autumn 2002), 52-77
Green, Robert, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Haslam, Sara, Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel, and the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
Judd, Alan, Ford Madox Ford (London: Collins, 1990)
Meixner, John A., Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Moser, Thomas C., The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II.
Seiden, Melvin, ‘Persecution and Paranoia in Parade’s End’, Criticism, 8:3 (Summer 1966), 246-62.
Skinner, Paul, ‘The Painful Processes of Reconstruction: History in No Enemy and Last Post’, in History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, no. 3 (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York: 2004), 65-75.
Tate, Trudi, Modernism, History and the First World War (Machester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
Wiesenfarth, Joseph, Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
Wiley, Paul L., Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1962).
Tetralogy
A tetralogy is a compound work that is made up of four distinct works, just as a trilogy is made up of three works....
(four related novels) by Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
published between 1924 and 1928. It is set mainly in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
and on the Western Front
Western Front (World War I)
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne...
in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, where Ford served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life vividly depicted in the novels.
In 1998, the Modern Library
Modern Library
The Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...
ranked Parade's End 57th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In December 2010, John N. Gray hailed it as "possibly the greatest 20th-century novel in English". In 2011 HBO, BBC and VRT announced a tv adaptation
Parade's End (television series)
Parade's End is a forthcoming HBO/BBC Two television miniseries, expected for release in 2012. It is an adaptation of the tetralogy of novels of the same name by Ford Madox Ford. Its five episodes will be directed by Susanna White and written by Tom Stoppard...
written by Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...
and starring Benedict Cumberbatch
Benedict Cumberbatch
Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch is an English film, television, and theatre actor. His most acclaimed roles include Stephen Hawking in the BBC drama Hawking ; William Pitt in the historical film Amazing Grace ; the protagonist Stephen Ezard in the miniseries thriller The Last Enemy ; Paul...
and Rebecca Hall
Rebecca Hall
Rebecca Maria Hall is an English actress.In 2003, Hall won the Ian Charleson Award for her debut stage performance in a production of Mrs. Warren's Profession...
.
History
The four novels were originally published under the titles: Some Do Not . . .Some Do Not . . .
Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford Madox Ford’s highly-regarded tetralogy Parade's End, was originally published in April 1924 by Duckworth and Co. The following is a summary of the plot chapter by chapter.-Part I:I.iSome Do Not ....
(1924), No More Parades
No More Parades (novel)
No More Parades is the second novel of Ford Madox Ford's highly-regarded tetralogy about the First World War, Parade's End. It was published in 1925, and was extraordinarily well-reviewed.-Part I:...
(1925), A Man Could Stand Up --
A Man Could Stand Up --
A Man Could Stand Up - is the third novel of Ford Madox Ford's highly-regarded sequence of four novels known collectively as Parade's End. It was first published in 1926.-Summary of the Novel:...
(1926), and Last Post
Last Post (novel)
Last Post is the fourth and final novel of Ford Madox Ford's highly-regarded sequence of four novels, Parade's End. It was published in January 1928 in the UK by Duckworth, and in the US under the title The Last Post by Albert and Charles Boni, and also the Literary Guild of America.Last Post is...
(or The Last Post in the U.S.A.) (1928). They were combined into one volume as Parade's End, which has been ranked at number 57 on the Modern Library
Modern Library
The Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...
's 100 Best Novels
Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels
Modern Library's 100 Best Novels is a list of the best English-language novels of the 20th century as selected by the Modern Library. Both Modern Library and Random House USA, the parent company, are US companies. Critics have argued that this is responsible for a very American view of the greatest...
list.
It has been adapted for television by Sir Tom Stoppard for the BBC, and is due to be broadcast in 2012.
Plot
The novels chronicle the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy land-owning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. Tietjens may or may not be the father of the child of his wife, Sylvia, a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him. Meanwhile, Tietjens' incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragetteSuffragette
"Suffragette" is a term coined by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory label for members of the late 19th and early 20th century movement for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, in particular members of the Women's Social and Political Union...
, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. The two central novels follow Tietjens in the army in France and Belgium, as well as Sylvia and Valentine in their separate paths over the course of the war.
More detailed summaries are given on the separate pages for each of the novels: follow the links in the section above.
Literary notes
Almost uniquely among war novels, Tietjens' consciousness takes primacy over the war-events it filters. Ford constructs a protagonist for whom the war is but one layer of his life, and not always even the most prominent though he is in the middle of it. In a narrative beginning before the war and ending after the armistice, Ford's project is to situate an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral and psychological complexity.Textual history
The four novels were reissued separately by Penguin just after the Second World War (in 1948). They were first combined into one volume under the collective title Parade's End (which had been suggested by Ford, though he didn't live to see an omnibus version) in the Knopf edition of 1950, which has been the basis of several subsequent reissues. Graham GreeneGraham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
controversially omitted Last Post from his Bodley Head edition of Ford's writing, calling it "an afterthought which he (Ford) had not intended to write and later regretted having written. Greene went on to state that "...the Last Post was more than a mistake—it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade's End." Certainly Last Post is very different from the other three novels. It is concerned with peace and reconstruction, and Christopher Tietjens is absent for most of the narrative, which is structured as a series of interior monologues by those closest to him. Yet it has had influential admirers, from Dorothy Parker and Carl Van Doren to Anthony Burgess and Malcolm Bradbury (who also included it in his 1992 Everyman edition). The first annotated and critical edition of the novels, edited by Max Saunders, Joseph Wiesenfarth, Sara Haslam, and Paul Skinner, was published by Carcanet Press in 2010-11.
Further reading
For further discussions of the novels comprising Parade’s End see for example:Auden, W. H., ‘Il faut payer’, Mid-Century, no. 22 (Feb. 1961), 3-10.
Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, third edition (Manchester: Carcanet: 1996).
Bradbury, Malcolm, ‘Introduction’, Parade's End (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992).
Brown, Dennis, ‘Remains of the Day: Tietjens the Englishman’, in Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, no. 2, ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA.: Rodopi, 2003), 161-74.
Calderaro, Michela A., A Silent New World: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (Bologna. Editrice CLUEB [Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria, Editrice Bologna], 1993).
Cassell, Richard A., Ford Madox Ford: A Study of his Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962).
Gordon, Ambrose, Jr, The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1964).
Gasiorek, Andrzej, ‘The Politics of Cultural Nostalgia: History and Tradition in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End’ Literature & History, 11:2 (third series) (Autumn 2002), 52-77
Green, Robert, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Haslam, Sara, Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel, and the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
Judd, Alan, Ford Madox Ford (London: Collins, 1990)
Meixner, John A., Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Moser, Thomas C., The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II.
Seiden, Melvin, ‘Persecution and Paranoia in Parade’s End’, Criticism, 8:3 (Summer 1966), 246-62.
Skinner, Paul, ‘The Painful Processes of Reconstruction: History in No Enemy and Last Post’, in History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, no. 3 (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York: 2004), 65-75.
Tate, Trudi, Modernism, History and the First World War (Machester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
Wiesenfarth, Joseph, Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
Wiley, Paul L., Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1962).