Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War

This collection is the first specialised study since Frederic Jameson’s influential 1979 book Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist to deal with the important question of Lewis as a mass of ‘unbound impulses released from the rationalising censorship of a respectable consciousness’, and arguing for a more nuanced and historically aware view of Lewis and his work. The eight contributors consider Lewis’s career from its inception to his final novels within a major focus on the First World War and the inter-war period. Their essays examine Lewis’s First World War art, his post-war politics and aesthetics, the new turn his painting and thought took in the 1930s, and the connections between modernism, war, and aggression. Overall, the collection offers a reassessment of the conventional view of Lewis as the uncontrolled aggressor of British modernism.