SOURCE: "The Denuded Place: War and Form in Parade's End and U.S.A. "in The First World War in Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Holger Klein, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1976, pp. 193-209.

An English man of letters, Bradbury is best known as the author of such satiric novels as Eating People Is Wrong (1959) and Stepping Westward (1965). In the following excerpt from his comparative examination of post-World War I epic novels, Bradbury suggests that Ford juxtaposed in Parade's End Edwardian realism with Modernist experimental techniques to demonstrate the passing of Tietjens' way of life.

Parade's End is the culmination of Ford Madox Ford's achievement, rivalled only by his novel of 1915, The Good Soldier, not directly about the war. But it came late in a long, mixed career; Ford—then Ford Madox Hueffer—had been writing since the turn of the century. An exemplary Edwardian novelist...