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Parade's End: Volume III

A Man Could Stand Up -: A Novel

Ford Madox Ford

Edited by Sara Haslam

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Categories: War writings
Imprint: Carcanet Fiction
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2012)
9781847778635
£18.95 £17.05
Paperback (400 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2011)
9781847770141
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  • Because she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk... They had that same sort of good, bread-and-butter brains; without much of the romantic... No doubt a touch...in him. Otherwise he would not always have been in these muddles. He gave all he possessed to anyone who asked for it. That was alright. But that those sponged on him should also involve him in intolerable messes... That was not proper. One ought to defend oneself against that!

    Because... If you do not defend yourself against that, look how you let in your nearest and dearest - those who have to sympathise with you in your confounded troubles whilst yo moon on, giving away more and more and getting into more troubles! In this case it was she who was his nearest and dearest... Or had been!
    A Man Could Stand Up, the third volume of Parade’s End, brings Ford’s characters to the ‘crack across the table of History’, across which lie their uncertain post-war futures. Divided into three parts, the novel is a kaleidoscopic vision of society at a climactic moment. The Armistice Day fireworks heard by Valentine Wannop in London with which the novel opens are echoed in the nightmare bombardment of the second part, as we are taken back to the war and Christopher Tietjens, staggering through the mud of No Man’s Land with a wounded soldier in his arms. The final section returns to Armistice Day and joins the two characters in a frenetic dance, while Tietjens’ wartime comrades smash glasses drunkenly around them.

    For the first time, the four novels that make up Ford Madox Ford’s First World War masterpiece Parade’s End are published in fully annotated editions, with authoritative corrected texts. Each novel is edited by a leading Ford expert.

    A Man Could Stand Up – includes
    -- the first reliable text, based on the hand-corrected typescript and first editions
    -- a major critical introduction by Sara Haslam, Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University and author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War
    -- an account of the novel’s composition and reception
    -- annotations explaining historical references, military terms, literary and topical allusions
    -- a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant deletions and revisions
    -- a bibliography of further reading

    Cover painting: Paul Nash, The Menin Road,1919, IWM Art 2242 (detail). By permission of the Imperial War Museum. Cover design StephenRaw.com
    Acknowledgements
    List of Illustrations
    List of Short Titles

    Introduction
    A Note on this Edition of Parade’s End
    A Note on the Text of
    A Man Could Stand Up

    A Man Could Stand Up –: A Novel

    Textual Notes
    Select Bibliography

    Sara Haslam
    Sara Haslam is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the Open University. She studied at the University of Liverpool, and King’s College London, and was a founder member of the Ford Madox Ford Society, of which she is currently Chair. She is author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox ... read more
    Praise for Ford Madox Ford 'what Ford conveys above all is less his particular preference than his radical passion for the novel as an instrument and what can be done with it.'
    C.H. Sisson
    'It displays Ford's dedication to his art; it demonstrates, also, the possibilities of English prose in the hands of a master.'
    Peter Ackroyd, The Sunday Times
    'The Rash Act ought to be bought and read by all interested in the novel as an art form... The action takes place in the French South which Ford loved, but man no longer sustains the tradition of myth and history which that region once represented... Here in The Rash Act we have the death of morality and responsibility - a forbidding theme, but, in the paradox of art, it is made to serve a tapestry of rich colour and galloping vivacity.'
    Anthony Burgess, Observer
    'No Enemy is Ford Madox Ford's little-known First World War novel, musing and reflective, published for the first time in Britain by Carcanet and ably edited by Paul Skinner. Congratulations to them both.'
    Alan Judd, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 30th June 2002
    'Of the various demands... that he show us the way in which a society works, that he show an understanding of the human heart, that he create characters in whose reality we believe and for whose fate we care, that he describe things and people so that we feel their physical presence, that he illuminate our moral consciousness, that he make us laugh and cry, that he delight us by his craftmanship, there is not one, it seems to me, that Ford does not completely satisfy.'
    W. H. Auden
    'Ford Madox Ford's Parad'€™s End, arguably the most sophisticated British fiction to come out of that war. Carcanet's reissue of the first volume, Some Do Not (£18.95), is the first reliable text, reconstructing Ford's dramatic original ending. Brilliantly edited by Max Saunders and now to be filmed (scripted by Tom Stoppard), it deserves to be€” and will be€” better known.'
    Alan Judd, Books of the Year 2010, The Spectator.
    'Of the various demands one can make of the novelist, that he show us the way in which a society works, that he show an understanding of the human heart, that he create characters whose reality we believe and for whose fate we care, that he describe things and people so that we feel their physical presence, that he illuminate our moral consciousness, that he make us laugh and cry, that he delight us by his craftsmanship, there is not one, it seems to me, that Ford does not completely satisfy. There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.'
    W.H.Auden, 1961
    Praise for Sara Haslam 'One of the best books I have ever read about Englishness.'
    AS Byatt, The Guardian
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