ABSTRACT
In Modernism and the Fate of Individuality, H. Michael Levenson describes Ford Madox Ford as ‘a revolutionary with a bad conscience’ and goes on to observe that he ‘was reluctant to discard those traditions which he professed to scorn, and faced with competing alternatives, he habitually preferred both. Arthur Mizener is also dismissive of Ford’s critical writing on style, technique, and theory, suggesting that ‘Ford’s theory is, like most writer’s theories, a rationalization of his own practice as a writer rather than a description of any actual historical movement’. Prior to the establishment of the new critical context which Jesse Matz’s work helped to create, however, twentieth-century critics were not routinely dismissive of Ford as a theorist of Impressionism. Colombino has also celebrated the ‘conceptual instabilities’ in Ford’s work, focusing especially on the way they manifest themselves in his theoretical writings on Impressionism.
