Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War

This collection is a specialised study to deal with the important question of Lewis’s aggression. 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 interwar period. Their chapters examine Lewis’s First World War art, his postwar politics and aesthetics, the new turn his painting and thought took in the 1930s and the connections between modernism, war and aggression. Overall, the volume offers a reassessment of the conventional view of Lewis as the uncontrolled aggressor of British modernism.

Contents

1. Introduction David Peters Corbett; 2. Wyndham Lewis: war and aggression Alan Munton; 3. Wyndham Lewis, the anti-war war artist Tom Normand; 4. Actors and spectators in the theatre of war: Wyndham Lewis's First World War art and literature Christine Hardegen; 5. Shellshock, anti-Semitism and the agency of the avant-garde Geoff Gilbert; 6. 'Grief with a yard wise grin': war and Wyndham Lewis's Tyros David Peters Corbett; 7. 'Its time for another war': the historical unconscious and the failure of modernism Paul Edwards; 8. Wyndham Lewis and history paining in the later 1930s Andrew Causey; 9. Aggression, aesthetics, modernity: Wyndham Lewis and the fate of art David A. Wragg; Notes; Index.