“The war had made a man of him!”: Englishness, Identity, and the First World War in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End

The First World War is the major event of the early 20th century that radically changed the way British literary modernists approached their written production, especially those who directly fought in it and experienced its horrors first-hand. Among them was Ford Madox Ford, a key figure of literary modernism in Britain, who transposed much of his experience during those years into one of his masterpieces, the tetralogy Parade’s End. The objective of this thesis is to analyse in depth all four volumes of said work, and a particular focus will be placed on the way the author represents his country and national identity before, during, and after the Great War. To this end, following the protagonist’s tribulations as a gentleman still devoted to olden ideals will be pivotal, and charting his struggles in the modern, unwelcoming world both at home and at the front proves the harsh reality several of such men had to face after 1914.