Parade’s End and the Modernist Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Literary Toryism

Koenraad Claes reflects on the often overlooked Modernist figure of Ford Madox Ford by examining his tetralogy of novels Parade’s End(1924-1928). For all of its deployment of a variety of Modernist techniques in what Ford calls ‘progression d’effet’ as well as pages-long sections of streams of consciousness, Parade’s End,Claes argues, deploys literary modes from nineteenth-century Realist and ‘condition of England’ fiction. Sensitive to the political ideologies in play, Claes traces some of the meaningful parallels and inverted mirroring between the plot structure of Parade’s End and that of Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybiland Walter Scott’s historical romances.