Wyndham Lewis and Modernism

This book offers an account of the development and significance of the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis to the history of Anglo-American modernism as well as to that modernism’s internal critique. This book offers an introduction to the work of Wyndham Lewis, one of the most important of the Anglo-American modernists, who has until recently been neglected. It traces Lewis’s influential involvement in the Vorticist movement; his commitment to early avant-gardism; his relations with figures such as Pound, Eliot and Joyce; and his gradual movement away from modernism towards a theory of satire. Lewis was also significant as a cultural critic and a professional controversialist. This book explores his polemical views on gender, sexuality, politics, and society, the commodification of culture, subjectivity, and aesthetics. It concludes with a discussion of Lewis’s importance to the current critical reevaluation of literary modernism.