The music of prose: a reading of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

Lockyer, Rebekah Lucy (2014). The music of prose: a reading of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End. University of Birmingham. M.Phil.

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Abstract

The artistic fields of music and literature have long been connected by metaphor, and combined through song. The late nineteenth century saw a significant revaluation of the relationship between the arts, and the revolutionary aesthetics of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk had a profound impact on the cultural world. As the son of a musicologist and Wagner expert, Ford Hermann Hueffer (Ford Madox Ford) was greatly influenced by these aesthetics, and despite his abortive musical career, his understanding of music was carried into literary work. Taking as its starting point the pioneering work on Ford’s musical youth by Carl Stang and Sondra Smith (1989), this thesis contends that the writer’s musicality finds its ultimate outlet in his Great War tetralogy, Parade’s End. I also assert that it is the combined force of this duality of form which enables Ford to address the ‘inexpressible’ trauma of war. Examining key musical references and formal techniques from across the novel, framed by an exploration of the 2013 quartet Ghosts of Great Violence (Philip Grange) inspired by Ford’s interior monologue style, I argue that the long neglected connection between music and Ford’s literary techniques is vital for an appreciation of Parade’s End.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Masters by Research > M.Phil.)

Award Type:

Masters by Research > M.Phil.

Supervisor(s):