Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War

by Edited by David Peters Corbett

• ISBN13: 9780521561181
• ISBN10: 0521561183
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-03-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of plates	ix	(2)
List of contributors	xi	(1)
Acknowledgements	xii
1 Introduction: 'the subject of modern war'	1	(13)
DAVID PETERS CORBETT
2 Wyndham Lewis: war and aggression	14	(24)
ALAN MUNTON
3 Wyndham Lewis, the anti-war war artist	38	(20)
TOM NORMAND
4 Actors and spectators in the theatre of war: Wyndham Lewis's First World War art and literature	58	(20)
CHRISTINE HARDEGEN
5 Shellshock, anti-Semitism, and the agency of the avant-garde	78	(21)
GEOFF GILBERT
6 'Grief with a yard wide grin': war and Wyndham Lewis's Tyros	99	(25)
DAVID PETERS CORBETT
7 'It's time for another war': the historical unconscious and the failure of modernism	124	(31)
PAUL EDWARDS
8 Wyndham Lewis and history painting in the later 1930s	155	(26)
ANDREW CAUSEY
9 Aggression, aesthetics, modernity: Wyndham Lewis and the fate of art	181	(30)
DAVID A. WRAGG
Notes	211	(33)
Index	244