Abstract
Ford Madox Ford wrote two works of literary history, The English Novel (1929) and The March of Literature (1938). The former at first proposes the difficulties of narrating the development of English fiction, but argues that such a problem is resolved when the role of French literature is introduced. Thus a bi-national literary history emerges, whereby early English fiction (Austen, Richardson) influenced French (Flaubert especially), which in turn influenced more recent stylists like Joseph Conrad and, implicitly, Ford himself. The stress in this text is on the techniques increasingly available to authors throughout periods leading up to the triumphal emergence of Modernism. But when Ford narrated the history of world literature a decade later, gone were the teleological straight lines, and gone also was the prominence awarded to Modernism and literary Impressionism. Instead, features we associate with Modernism were discovered to be pronounced in Herodotus, the Troubadours, or Edward Gibbon. Thus Ford’s last work relies on circularity and cyclicality to narrate global literary trends, mirroring imperial narratives of rise and fall rather than nationalist ones that posit a mythic origin and cannot envision any terminus. Modernism and Impressionism, then, are not so much innovations as stylistic rediscoverings, recurring manifestations rather than culturally unique moments.