The Good Soldier Centenary Conference
Swansea University
12-14 September 2013
Call for Papers
Proposals are invited for an international conference on The Good Soldier. Long regarded as Ford’s greatest early achievement, The Good Soldier is one of the finest modernist novels in English. This conference seeks to widen our comparative assessment of Ford’s first masterpiece, whose centenary in 2015 will be marked by a special volume of essays in the annual series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies.
We are keen to receive proposals from graduate students as well as established scholars, and we especially welcome papers discussing The Good Soldier in relation to Ford’s other writing: his essays, novels, short stories, poetry, and life-writing.
Connections might be made with the work of other writers who were active in the years before the First World War or who later wrote about that time. The pre-war period might also be extended to include the early years of the war itself, a time, as David Jones suggested, when there was still ‘a certain attractive amateurishness, and elbow-room for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a less exacting past’.
Other writers whose work might be considered alongside The Good Soldier include, for example, Richard Aldington, Vera Brittain, Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph Conrad, H.D., T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Oliver Madox Hueffer, Violet Hunt, Henry James, David Jones, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rose Macaulay, Marcel Proust, Siegfried Sassoon, May Sinclair, Edward Thomas, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf.
Other papers might consider the novel’s ‘afterlife’: its influence and echoes from 1915 to the present day. A paper would also be welcome on the 1981 television adaptation directed by Kevin Billington and starring Jeremy Brett, Robin Ellis, Susan Fleetwood, and Vickery Turner.
Please send proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers to the conference organiser, Geraint Evans, by 3 June 2013: [email protected]
Click here for the Conference Poster
We are keen to receive proposals from graduate students as well as established scholars, and we especially welcome papers discussing The Good Soldier in relation to Ford’s other writing: his essays, novels, short stories, poetry, and life-writing.
Connections might be made with the work of other writers who were active in the years before the First World War or who later wrote about that time. The pre-war period might also be extended to include the early years of the war itself, a time, as David Jones suggested, when there was still ‘a certain attractive amateurishness, and elbow-room for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a less exacting past’.
Other writers whose work might be considered alongside The Good Soldier include, for example, Richard Aldington, Vera Brittain, Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph Conrad, H.D., T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Oliver Madox Hueffer, Violet Hunt, Henry James, David Jones, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rose Macaulay, Marcel Proust, Siegfried Sassoon, May Sinclair, Edward Thomas, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf.
Other papers might consider the novel’s ‘afterlife’: its influence and echoes from 1915 to the present day. A paper would also be welcome on the 1981 television adaptation directed by Kevin Billington and starring Jeremy Brett, Robin Ellis, Susan Fleetwood, and Vickery Turner.
Please send proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers to the conference organiser, Geraint Evans, by 3 June 2013: [email protected]
Click here for the Conference Poster