Customer Reviews

The March of Literature: From Confucius' Day to Our Own (British Literature Series)

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A bit of a charlatan and a bit of a blowhard, Ford is nonethess one of the more attractive figures of 20th Century literature. He's fun to read, almost in spite of his rambling style and at times almost incoherent attempts at analysis. There's something lovable about him that surfaces in the conversational tone of this book, an obvious attempt to make money during his low-income twilight years. His wanderings thru ancient Chinese and Hebrew writings don't follow any recognizable thread and support no clear thesis. . . but what the heck?
Nevertheless, he's quite strong on later written prose (after all, he wrote a terrific novel in The Good Soldier). . This is a book to be sampled in small bites, not one to be read cover to cover. It's loaded with semi-precious gems and I'm happy to have it in my library.

This was Ford Madox Ford's attempt to lay out the panorama of literature from ancient to modern times for the general readership. It's largely forgotten today, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it's still in print.

Ford was a champion of new, experimental work in his time. That would be the poets and novelists of Modernity as we see them now. Beyond the writers of his day, he also felt that there was importance in both the popular and obscure works of earlier generations. This book lays out his opinions and insights on many centuries of (despite the subtitle) mostly western literature.

This is probably not the preferred "general survey of world literature" today, but for literature folks this is a wonderful glimpse of our culture's, and Ford's personal, take on literature before the second world war. You'll certainly disagree at times, and some of his stances have not aged well, but what is here is well reasoned and interesting.