Fleeting Furniture: Post-War Materiality and Modernist Strategies of Evasion in Ford Madox Ford’s Last Post

Julia Fernelius

doi:10.54797/tfl.v53i2-3.16567

Författare

Julia Fernelius Stockholms Universitet

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54797/tfl.v53i2-3.16567

Nyckelord:

Ford Madox Ford, Last Post, modernism, First World War, furniture, style, evasion, anti-triumphalism, thing theory, domestic interior

Abstract

Fleeting Furniture: Post-War Materiality and Modernist Strategies of Evasion in Ford Madox Ford’s Last Post

In the last novel of the Parade’s End-series, Last Post (1928), Ford Madox Ford depicts the aftermath of the First World War, and the cataclysmic social, cultural, and material changes it caused, from the perspective of the Tietjens brothers’ rural home in South East England. The novel’s position in the tetralogy has often been questioned, as its setting as well as form differs significantly from the previous three novels. However, as this article will show, the novel also offers Ford’s most substantial examination of the consequences of war. This article looks at the importance of things in Ford’s depiction of post-war reconstruction, arguing that by foregrounding furniture and other domestic objects as a thematic concern, Ford seeks to evade a homogenising narrative of reconciliation and patriotic celebration. The novel participates in a modernist rejection of empirical, objective representation, where things rather than events serve as nodes of reference for the psychological as well as material transformations of the Post-War period.

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Författarbiografi

Julia Fernelius, Stockholms Universitet

Doktorand vid engelska institutionen på Stockholms universitet. Hennes forskning kretsar huvudsakligen kring materiell kultur, ting och representationer av hemmet i brittisk modernism och tidig nittonhundratalslitteratur. För närvarande arbetar hon på sin avhandling “The Place of Things: Material Consciousness and the Modernist Collector in Parade’s End” som fokuserar på representationen av ting, möbler och hemmet i Ford Madox Fords tetralogi Parade’s End.

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