Parade's End Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John W. Crawford

Critical Essay by John W. Crawford

SOURCE: "Ford Madox Ford Adds a Volume to His Epic of the War," in The New York Times Book Review, October 24, 1926, p. 7.

In the following review of A Man Could Stand Up, Crawford characterizes Ford's Tietiens series as a modern-day epic.

Ford Madox Ford has now reached the third of his monumental series of novels. There are those who say the epic is a dead form which can never be made to function in such a complicated and rational and disillusioned age as ours. The epic is not dead, for its impulse has surely impelled the setting down, in passionate narrative prose, of the adventures of Christopher Tietjens. If the heartbreaking, quixotic Christopher is not of the stuff of great legends, a sort of contemporary Bayard, with much honest fear and many undeserved reproaches, then there is no heroism left. If the personal and public battles in...
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