ABSTRACT
Ford Madox Ford’s three major works of literary criticism―The Critical Attitude, The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, and The March of Literature ―span a period of nearly thirty years, during which he produced his most celebrated fiction, as well as some of his most substantial poetry. The element which for Ford puts the writer or critic outside history is surely that of personal choice, which with him gains much more prominence than with the avowedly ‘impersonal’ Eliot. In the summation of his critical career, The March of Literature, Ford appears to be venturing into new literary territory and extending the role of the literary critic. On the surface there are contradictions in Fortunati’s claim that the reader Ford imagines for his novels is similar to the one theorised by Barthes and other post-structuralist critics.
