This volume about the modernist writer and artist Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) presents him as a radical figure in twentieth-century modernism. The authors rediscover aspects of Lewis's work which show how his fiction challenges modernist norms, and how his acute and wide-ranging critique of culture has a vital contemporary relevance. Lewis's range is extraordinary - it covers Nietzsche as well as classic cinema, Renaissance art and English classicism. Being politically conservative, he had nonetheless a place on the political left, and he can be seen as a postmodernist before his time. These essays by leading Spanish and British specialists reveal Lewis as one of the key modernists of our time.
Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis developed a highly experimental art; they were attracted simultaneously to political programs remarkably backward in outlook--the autocracies of Fascist Italy and Germany. That paradox, central to the problematic achievement of Anglo-American modernism, is freshly addressed in this study. Here Sherry examines the influence of music and painting on literature, presents original research on European intellectual history, and proposes a new understanding of ideology as a force in the literary imagination. Following the example of continental ideologues, the English modernists use the material of aesthetic experience to prove truths of human nature, making art the basis for social values and recommendations. This sensibility enriches their work, shaping the varied textures of Pound's Cantos and the complex designs of Lewis's painting and fiction, but their mastery of avant-garde techniques endorses the authority of an antique state. Sherry returns their "totalitarian synthesis" of art and politics to its originating moment, following its trajectory from 1910 to the eve of World War II.
Wyndham Lewis was equally talented as a writer and a painter. Providing an overview of the visual, literary and philosophical dimensions of Lewis's work, Edwards also considers them as an integrated whole. He also discusses Lewis's fascist sympathies.
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was one of the most innovative writers and painters of his time. An indefatigable critic of ideology, politics, and culture, Lewis was also one of modernism's key creative artists and a unique twentieth-century thinker. This book offers a scholarly companion to his written work.
This study connects the idiosyncratic modernism of Wyndham Lewis, co-founder of the Vorticist art movement, with works of several artists from the British art rock tradition, among them Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, art-punk pioneers Wire and electronic pop musician John Foxx. By taking a transdisciplinary and intermedial approach to texts from two fields normally studied in isolation and staking out the elements of a shared modernist ethos, the book presents a new perspective on both fields relevant to scholars of literature, popular culture, and the visual arts alike. While the book rests on sound research from the fields of literary criticism, art history, and pop theory, the structure and writing of the book is fundamentally designed to be accessible and comprehensible to non-scholarly readers.
The first exhibition in Italy dedicated to Vorticism, Britain's contribution to the visual avant-gardes that flourished in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Its distinctive figurative abstraction was a London-based Anglo-American response to Cubism and Futurism. Led by poet Ezra Pound and by artist and writer Wyndham Lewis Vorticism flared up between 1913 and 1918.
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a British novelist, painter, essayist, and polemicist. Credited with being the founder of the only modernist movement from Britain, Vorcticism, Lewis approached politics as an aesthetic discipline. His 1931 work Hitler was written after his visit to Germany that year, and highlights the charged atmosphere and uneasy tension that permeated Berlin. Bringing his wit and humor to analyze a country on the eve of revolution, Lewis argues that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler may truly be the best option for Germans. Branded a National Socialist sympathizer - Wyndham Lewis's reputation never recovered from the release of this book. Even later disavowals in The Hitler Cult and The Jews, Are They Human? (both in 1939) failed to restore his image. Throughout the 1930's Wyndham Lewis persisted in his advocacy of what is now termed "appeasement". During the war, he fled to the United States and Canada, all the while working to distance himself from his 1931 writings. His later work began explicitly praising a radical individualism which had been ever-present, but never before at the forefront. He returned home to England after the war, and went blind in 1951, but kept writing critiques and fiction of such quality that he had a brief renaissance of popularity before his death in 1957. Despite this, the shadow of Hitler continues to haunt the legacy of Wyndham Lewis. Antelope Hill is proud to release Wyndham Lewis's Hitler, in print for the first time since 1972, with an original foreword by John "Borzoi" Chapman, so that the reader can judge for himself the character of this unique artist.
