Making Modernism Fit

Rob Hawkes argues that Ford Madox Ford and other “misfit” early twentieth-century writers who remain partly or wholly outside the parameters of modernist formal experimentation (Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Rebecca West, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves) challenge the value of such categorization. Hawkes devotes his first two chapters to discussions of character and plot development in Ford’s early work. The second half of his book focuses on Ford’s fictional and autobiographical writings about World War I. Hawkes’s readings are persuasive, although one wonders whether, by creating alternative categories for “non-modernist” writers, or by expanding the term beyond usefulness, he escapes the very traps he identifies for those who wish to engage “modernism.”