Whilst devoting a chapter to modernism will undoubtedly seem a prerequisite in a Research Companion on Ford Madox Ford, extending the topic to postmodernism may appear perplexing when dealing with an author who was born in 1873 and died in 1939. Due to the time frame of his writing, his collaborations with Conrad and his allegiance to authors such as James or Flaubert, Ford has mostly been identified as a transitional figure straddling fin-de-siècle, Edwardian literature and modernism. His links with various modernist movements and authors are well known. Nevertheless, as this chapter will show, fitting Ford's literary technique within a distinct literary period, even one as heterogeneous as modernism, can prove a challenging, if not impossible task, and one that has been much addressed by scholarship over the past few decades. This chapter will examine the existing criticism on the oft-debated question of Ford’s relationship to avant-garde and modernist movements, and as a result of its survey will propose an alternative view of the difficulty in situating Ford in a stable position within the aesthetics of his time. Ford’s writing may be considered as questioning the long-established categories of ‘realism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’. The divide between these categories has lately been reconsidered by critics; examining the lack of fixity of Ford’s position therefore contributes actively to the current debate on literary periodisation.