'How shall we write history?': The modernist historiography of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Rebecca West

This study explores how several British modernists applied the experimental methods of literary modernism to the writing of history and historical novels. In examining the works of Conrad, Ford and West, I pose several questions regarding the relationship of modernism and historiography: why in histories of the historical novel do modernist works get overlooked? What would a modernist work of history look like? Can contemporary historians searching for new forms find models in these writers?;In my dissertation I distinguish these three writers from the "High Moderns" in terms of the former's responses to narrative history. Eliot and Pound eschewed narrative as a means of accessing history; Joyce and Yeats employed myth as an organizational principle for their literary shaping of historical events. In contrast, Conrad, Ford and West maintained narrative as the primary vehicle for relating events of the past. Nevertheless, despite their investment in narrative, they wrote histories with the same sense of skepticism and experimentation they brought to their other fiction. I begin with Conrad's Nostromo, which I see as the founding text of modernist historiography. This historical novel self-consciously plays with the ambiguity of the term "history," which can mean both historical referent (events, forces of the past etc.) and historical narrative itself ("a history"). Ford Madox Ford, in his early historical novels, somewhat naively believed that one could capture an historical era with an homologous literary style, but his masterpiece The Good Soldier took him beyond these practices into a more skeptical modernism that dramatized the distance between any textual narrative and the events it describes. While some critics see the novel's narrative circularity as reflecting circular notions of history, I instead read it as expressing Ford's belief in the circularity of historiography itself, the constant need for the retelling of events and the continual return of historians to key moments in time.;I then turn to Rebecca West's first novel The Return of the Soldier , which depicts a soldier who has returned from the front with amnesia, to interrogate the role of memory and forgetting in the writing of history. This theme recurs in Parade's End, Ford's wartime tetralogy, which I read as an (unacknowledged) rewriting of West's novel. I conclude with West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which I take to be the prime example of a modernist work of history. This travel tour through the Balkans on the eve of the Second World War reaches back to West's early engagements with literary modernism, as her great work stresses both the radical difficulties of writing history---what she terms "history's impossibility"---with an equally powerful, but more urgent necessity to record the Balkan way of life before the advance of the Nazis. West thus injects an ethical imperative into the modernist project, reminding us of the very human need for histories.