内容简介：
In the autumn if 1898, Joseph Conrad met for the first time Ford Madox Ford. A quarter of a century later in the summer of 1924, Jean Rhys entered on her brief affair with Ford in Paris. These two intense, stormy encounters provide the environment in which a remarkable series of modernist masterpieces of fiction first took shape. To Ford the two meetings seemed linked together because both appear to be steps in what he called, in his "Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance "(1924) and his "The March of Literature from Confucius to Modern Times" ""(1938), the movement of modern literature toward "Impressionism."
An important dimension of impressionist literature is the "opening" of the canon. Readers of Charlotte Bront"s Jane Eyre thought they had closed the book and understood it well, until Rhys gave them "Wide Sargasso Sea." Readers of Thomas Hughes' "Tom Brown's School-days "(1856) though they had solved the mystique of the British officer class, until "Lord Jim "reopened the question. The impressionist text typically stands in a critical relation to earlier texts, forcing us to rethink our judgments. It follows that Ford's literary criticism in "The March of Literature from Confucius to Modern Times" is a revaluation, a systematic reopening of the whole canon of Western literature.