The chapter opens by gauging the impact of French Symbolist poetry and Guy de Maupassant's fiction on the composition of Ford's The Good Soldier. The permanence of a seventeenth-century 'classic mood', the intense emotions beneath the serenity of the surface texture Ford finds in the French writers he most admires, fuse to generate the tenets of his modernist writing enterprise as well as his understanding of the French landscape. In the precisely shaped and yet suggestive words of Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, Ford divines a 'quality of quiet universality', capable of expanding imagination. This concept acquires broader semiotic and philosophical resonances in Ford's post-war non-fiction, such as A Mirror to France (1926), Provence (1935) and Great Trade Route (1937). The mirror, particularly prominent in A Mirror to France as a paradigm to conceive cultural terrain, practice and transmission, is gradually superseded in Ford's more mature writings by peripatetic models, especially the idea of accepting the capricious invitation of the roads as an almost sacred act producing space and thought.
The imagination of space: Ford Madox Ford and France
COLOMBINO, LAURA
2012-01-01
Abstract
The chapter opens by gauging the impact of French Symbolist poetry and Guy de Maupassant's fiction on the composition of Ford's The Good Soldier. The permanence of a seventeenth-century 'classic mood', the intense emotions beneath the serenity of the surface texture Ford finds in the French writers he most admires, fuse to generate the tenets of his modernist writing enterprise as well as his understanding of the French landscape. In the precisely shaped and yet suggestive words of Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, Ford divines a 'quality of quiet universality', capable of expanding imagination. This concept acquires broader semiotic and philosophical resonances in Ford's post-war non-fiction, such as A Mirror to France (1926), Provence (1935) and Great Trade Route (1937). The mirror, particularly prominent in A Mirror to France as a paradigm to conceive cultural terrain, practice and transmission, is gradually superseded in Ford's more mature writings by peripatetic models, especially the idea of accepting the capricious invitation of the roads as an almost sacred act producing space and thought.
I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
