Summary of the impact

Max Saunders' case study is based on his work on the critical edition of Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy of novels Parade's End (1924-8). This edition was used for the BBC/HBO series, adapted by Tom Stoppard. Saunders was literary consultant for the series, wrote about it in the media and gave the creative team advice. The adaptation has been watched by 2.5m viewers many of whom will not previously have been aware of Ford or his novels. BBC2 drama doubled its normal viewing figures for drama. The impact of the edition and of Saunders' wider scholarship on the adaptation is demonstrable in statements by the producer and director of the series.

Underpinning research

Max Saunders has been working on Ford Madox Ford for the whole of his career. When he joined King's in the late 1980s he had recently completed a PhD at Cambridge on "Ford Madox Ford and the reading of prose". He used this experience to write what became the definitive biography of Ford (3.1). Ford produced nearly eighty books and was widely read in his own time; yet he is under-read today. He was overshadowed by Joseph Conrad, his closest literary friend and collaborator. His reputation also suffered from the fact that even in his lifetime he was thought to be a prodigious liar. In addition to bringing a great deal of hitherto-unknown or forgotten information to public notice, Saunders' biography tackled these blemishes head-on by presenting Ford as a literary impressionist, a man for whom fictions were to be seen as having the same status as facts. The biography was called Ford Madox Ford: A Double Life, the doubleness coming from Ford's use of his writing to project a sense of a dual existence on the borders between life and fiction. The second volume of the biography includes an extended critical chapter on Parade's End, which was especially commended by reviewers. The reviewer in ELT called it `one of the best scholarly biographies I've ever read', adding: `Ford's great works remain The Good Soldier and the Parade's End tetralogy; the first merits a chapter of some sixty pages, while the second gets a chapter of over eighty. No one who writes on either of these masterpieces in the foreseeable future will be able to ignore these chapters'. The two volumes of the biography were reissued by OUP in 2012.

In the biography and in other works (3.2-3.4), Saunders was particularly concerned to identify what was distinctive about Ford's contribution to Modernism. In a series of articles, he developed his conception of Ford as impressionist. Ford was one of many writers of the fin de siècle to use that term about himself. Henry James, Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad also described themselves as impressionists at one time or another. But Saunders demonstrated the specific importance of impressionism in painting on Ford's practice as a writer. Ford was the grandson of Ford Madox Brown and he defined his own writing in terms of the visual arts, beginning quite self-consciously with Pre-Raphaelite models and going on to evolve just as deliberately the more interiorized, perceptual and modern style of his mature work. This focus on Ford's visual sense has been acknowledged as influencing the visual language of the BBC/HBO Parade's End. In Saunders' account, Ford embraced the impressionist painters' psychological emphasis on the processes of perception, but he also took the term to license a provocative freedom with fact, reminiscent of the decadent movement. This aspect of Ford's writerly practice led Saunders to research other approaches to life writing in the period. Much of his output in the first decade of this century was devoted to the concept of Modernist life writing, taking Ford as a leading exponent. In 2010, Saunders published the most extensive study we have of the varieties of life writing in the Modernist period, entitled Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (3.5). The link with Ford is clear in that `autobiografiction' is a term Saunders uses to described books in which the `I' is an adopted alter ego which is performed with complete convincingness.

Of particular relevance to this case study is the fact that Saunders led the team that produced the first fully-annotated critical edition of the four novels that make up Parade's End (3.6). He edited and annotated the first volume (Some Do Not) and collaborated on the other three (No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and Last Post). His edition of the first volume established the first authoritative and corrected text, based on comparison of Ford's autograph manuscript with the serialisation and first UK and US editions. It reconstructs an earlier version of the ending. Saunders also founded a comparative project assembling translators of Parade's End into several European languages. So far German and Spanish versions have been published, and a French one is in preparation.

References to the research

All items authored or edited by Saunders.

Details of the impact

In 2011 the BBC commissioned Mammoth Productions and Tom Stoppard to produce a television adaptation of Parade's End. As soon as the initial contracts were signed, Mammoth contacted Saunders to invite him to act as literary consultant on the series and he accepted. His first meeting with Stoppard took place in the summer of that year. They discussed the casting, and details of the language and historical background as well as deviations from Ford's original text. They remained in contact by telephone thereafter. As literary consultant, Saunders was invited to visit the production. He wrote an article about the filming of the adaptation for the Guardian (23 September 2011). He was also interviewed by Alan Yentob and acted as literary consultant in a special BBC Culture Show documentary about Ford intended to trail the dramatization (5.1). His research was described by the director of that documentary, who consulted him frequently, as his `bible' (5.2). The BBC/HBO dramatisation was screened in August-September 2012 in the UK and early 2013 in the US, Australia, France and Germany. The series was nominated for 7 BAFTAs, 5 Emmys and won 4 Broadcasting Press Guild awards.

Beneficiaries The beneficiaries of the edition were, of course, those who watched the adaptation on television or over the internet. It received massive publicity, and it has certainly raised consciousness about Ford's work. It also led to a spike in editions of Ford's novels. BBC books, Penguin Classics and Wordsworth Classics brought out their own editions of Parade's End on the strength of the mini-series and OUP proposed to produce a complete scholarly edition of Ford's Works in over forty volumes, with Saunders as its general editor. The series also generated a great deal of publicity about Ford and his novels and Saunders was directly involved in some of this. His OUP blog about the dramatization (5.3) was picked up by the New Statesman and carried on their website (5.4).

Details of the nature of the impact First, Saunders discussed aspects of the adaptation and production with Stoppard. Second, Saunders advised the team making the adaptation about Ford's artistic vision. Finally, Saunders had a profound impact on the series' visual language. The director of the adaptation has said that she wanted to place references to 20^th-century British art in Parade's End. The title sequence uses the techniques of the Vorticist photographers, the split frame images of the two central characters are a reference to the photographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn and the design of episode five draws on the paintings of Paul Nash. The director has written that a big influence [on these efforts] was Saunders' essay 'From Pre-Raphaelism to Impressionism' about the influence of the visual arts on Ford Madox Ford, published in the book Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture" (5.5).

Evidence or indicators of the extent of the impact Saunders (and the other three editors) received royalty payments for Mammoth Production's film rights to Parade's End, evidencing a clear pathway from edition to television adaptation (5.6). The filming of Parade's End took place in 2011- 12. Saunders had a correspondence with the Director testifying to the impact of his work on the production, and her use of his edition; and he discussed the casting, and details of the language and historical background, with Tom Stoppard.

Saunders had a similar correspondence with the Director of the BBC's Culture Show documentary 'Who on Earth was Ford Madox Ford?', to accompany the series, also substantiating the contribution made by his scholarship to the research for the programme (5.2). The director (who was also the producer) consulted him in depth, both in person and regularly by email, to discuss the range of Ford's life and work, as well as the location of visual and written materials to be used in the programme. For example, Saunders was able to provide him with a video copy of the only known movie footage of Ford. Both directors had read the biography carefully, as well as some of Saunders' other work on Ford.

The viewing figures for Parade's End in the UK averaged 2.47m, ranging from 3.85m to 1.81m; excluding iPlayer statistics, which show that a further 527,000 watched the first episode.

Sources to corroborate the impact

5.1 Credit for participation in BBC `The Culture Show' documentary, 1 Sept. 2012: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mlvkj

5.2 Letter from director of Culture Show documentary, `Who on Earth Was Ford Madox Ford', to Max Saunders (uploaded).

5.3 http://blog.oup.com/2012/09/life-of-ford-madox-ford/

5.4 http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/culture/2012/09/life-ford-madox-ford

5.5 http://jamesrussellontheweb.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/parades-end-tv-with-eye-for-painting.html (for the adaptation director's acknowledgement of Saunders' work on Ford and impressionism in influencing the visual language of the television series)

5.6 Royalty statement from Carcanet Press specifying percentage of film rights paid to volume editor for 2010 edition of Parade's End.