ABSTRACT
Ford Madox Ford’s perambulatory approach to culture and writing thus make continental concerns seminal in his years of apprenticeship and in his artistic maturity. Ford’s continental visions revolve, to a large degree, around the hubs of Basel and Provence. Ford’s efforts give us all the more reason to reappraise his keen existential perception of the dangers of cultural parochialism and the intellectual awareness which led him to struggle strenuously against literary insularity in general and its British form in particular. French presence increased with the advent of the Reformation, explains Ford, as Rye opened its doors to Huguenots, and there are traces of the ‘settlement of French refugees’, for the most part fishermen, who have a minister of their own. Renaissance Europe resonates with Ford’s literary version. However scantily acknowledged until now, Ford’s relevance to our times is made doubly significant by the geocritical turn of literary scholarship and by the politics of fencing and banning.
