The Cambridge Companion To Wyndham Lewis

This Companion offers fresh insight into the controversial works, both literary and visual, of Wyndham Lewis. Written by a team of leading experts, this book examines Lewis's work in light of contemporary concerns with radical politics, feminism and queer perspectives, and the effects of mass media.

This Companion offers fresh insight into the controversial works, both literary and visual, of Wyndham Lewis. Written by a team of leading experts, this book examines Lewis's work in light of contemporary concerns with radical politics, feminism and queer perspectives, and the effects of mass media.

The novel is modernism's most vital and experimental genre. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this 2007 Companion is an accessible and informative overview of the genre.

Including chapters on the major literary genres, intellectual, political and institutional contexts, film and the visual arts, this text provides both close analyses of individual works of modernism and a broader set of interpretive narratives.

Painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic, Lewis's multifarious activities defy easy categorisation. He launched the only twentieth-century English avant garde movement, Vorticism, in 1914. His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918. During the intervening World War, as an artillery officer at the third battle of Ypres, he gained his 'political education under fire'. Anti-war books of the 1930s argued against what he regarded as a war-mongering left-wing orthodoxy, and presented the case for the right. This placed him in the position somewhere between an advocate of appeasement and what looked uncomfortably like a Nazi sympathizer. Despite an admission, in 1939, that he had been wrong about Hitler, his reputation never recovered from the stigma of Fascism.After the Second World War, spent in penniless and bitter exile in Canada, he returned to London and, in the last decade of his life, received some measure of the success and recognition he had been denied for so long. It coincided, tragically, with the realisation that he was going blind. Visual expression denied him, he devoted all his remaining energies to writing. Seven books in as many years, written in laborious longhand when he was unable to see the

Modernism arose in a period of accelerating globalization in the late nineteenth century. Modernist writers and artists, while often loyal to their country in times of war, aimed to rise above the national and ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century in service to a cosmopolitan ideal. This Companion explores the international aspects of literary modernism by mapping the history of the movement across Europe and within each country. The essays place the various literary traditions within a social and historical context and set out recent critical debates. Particular attention is given to the urban centers in which modernism developed – from Dublin to Zürich, Barcelona to Warsaw – and to the movements of modernists across national borders. A broad, accessible account of European modernism, this Companion explores what this cosmopolitan movement can teach us about life as a citizen of Europe and of the world.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four is aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates, and academics. Situating the novel in multiple frameworks, including contextual considerations and literary histories, the book asks new questions about the novel's significance in an age in which authoritarianism finds itself freshly empowered.

A survey of the development of the novel since 1900, with detailed information about individual novels, themes and subgenres.