Parade's End: Volume III: A Man Could Stand Up -: A Novel

A Man Could Stand Up –, the third volume of Parade’s End, brings Ford’s characters to the ‘crack across the table of History’, across which lie their uncertain post-war futures. Divided into three parts, the novel is a kaleidoscopic vision of society at a climactic moment. The Armistice Day fireworks heard by Valentine Wannop in London with which the novel opens are echoed in the nightmare bombardment of the second part, as we are taken back to the war and Christopher Tietjens, staggering through the mud of No Man’s Land with a wounded soldier in his arms. The final section returns to Armistice Day and joins the two characters in a frenetic dance, while Tietjens’ wartime comrades smash glasses drunkenly around them. For the first time, the four novels that make up Ford Madox Ford’s First World War masterpiece Parade’s End are published in fully annotated editions, with authoritative corrected texts. Each novel is edited by a leading Ford expert. A Man Could Stand Up – includes -- the first reliable text, based on the hand-corrected typescript and first editions -- a major critical introduction by Sara Haslam, Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University and author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War -- an account of the novel’s composition and reception -- annotations explaining historical references, military terms, literary and topical allusions -- a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant deletions and revisions -- a bibliography of further reading Cover painting: Paul Nash, The Menin Road,1919, IWM Art 2242 (detail). By permission of the Imperial War Museum. Cover design StephenRaw.com

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Short Titles Introduction A Note on this Edition of Parade’s End A Note on the Text of A Man Could Stand Up – A Man Could Stand Up –: A Novel Textual Notes Select Bibliography

About the Author :
Sara Haslam is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the Open University. She studied at the University of Liverpool, and King’s College London, and was a founder member of the Ford Madox Ford Society, of which she is currently Chair. She is author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (Manchester University Press, 2002) and Life Writing (Routledge, 2009, with Derek Neale), and editor of Ford’s The Good Soldier (Wordsworth, 2010) and England and the English (Carcanet, 2003) as well as Ford Madox Ford and the City, the fourth volume of International Ford Madox Ford Studies (2005). She has published essays on the literature of the First World War, on Modernism, and on Ford, Thomas Hardy, the Brontës and Henry James.

Review :
'...Parade's End... is panoramic and beautifully written. It is a condemnation of the brutal senselessness and stupid waste of war. Through its fascinating scenic technique it paints detailed, intimate pictures of tents on the French battlefield, spa towns in Germany, the Inns of Court in the City, and English country estates, and it peoples these places with convincing characters who stay in the mind, especially Sylvia and Christopher Tietjens.' Edmund White, New York Review of Books