24 March 2015, 7.30pm
Rob Hawkes
The Poppleton Centre, Main Street, Upper Poppleton, York, YO26 6JT
Ford Madox Ford’s Parades End, which was adapted for television by Tom Stoppard in 2102, is the story of Christopher Tietjens, the youngest son of a Yorkshire country gentleman. While much recent discussion of the novel has focused on its status as ‘the finest novel about the first World War’ (Anthony Burgess), this talk will examine Tietjens as a Yorkshireman and consider Ford’s connections with the region.
What does Yorkshire represent in Ford’s great war novel and does being from Yorkshire help or hinder Tietjens in the trenches?
Dr Rob Hawkes is Senior Lecturer in English at Teesside University. He is author of Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: The First World War, Culture, and Modernity (Rodopi, 2015); War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism, and Psychology (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming); and An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford (Ashgate, forthcoming).
