Wyndham Lewis

‘“Style is Morality”? Aesthetics and Politics in the Amis Era’

by David James

Published in Textual Practice (2012)

In His Bad Books: Wyndham Lewis and Fascism

by Ivan Phillips

Published in 'The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies', Vol. 2 (2011), 105-34

“The Concept of Cultural Agency from Modernism to Cultural Studies.”

by Georgia Christinidis

Diss. University of Oxford, 2006.

This thesis traces the relationship between literary value and cultural agency in the context of cultural criticism... more This thesis traces the relationship between literary value and cultural agency in the context of cultural criticism through the work of five key critics, Wyndham Lewis, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Stuart Hall and John Fiske. All of them criticise society in cultural terms, implying a need for change, but have difficulties conceptualising the agency which could lead to change. Wyndham Lewis is the epitome of modernist elitism. He conceptualises both art and intellectuals, the only agents, as autonomous. As a result, however, the intellectuals’ agency is reduced to self-stylisation and momentary disruption. The Leavises attempt to constitute a critical minority through an educational project in order to combat the effects of the disintegration of the organic community. While their criticism asserts the effectiveness of cultural agency, it is elitist, restricting this agency to a minority. Stuart Hall questions the cultural values which form the normative basis of the criticism of Wyndham Lewis and the Leavises. While he is the only one of the critics discussed whose critical practice has a concrete goal, the realisation of socialism, his theory stops at the preconditions of agency, namely the constitution and the positioning of collective or individual agents. Lastly, John Fiske asserts that people are continuously actively participating in culture, but reduces agency to choice. The difficulties of conceptualising agency in the realm of culture express themselves in a series of tropes, particularly in the predominance of spatial over temporal metaphors, and in the trope of excess or ‘something more,’ which provides an impulse, but not an agent or a goal, for cultural intervention.

'Wyndham Lewis’s “Very Bad Thing”: Jazz and "The Apes of God"’, in James and Waddell (eds), 'Musicality and Modernist Form' (in preparation) (see 'Books' section)

by Nathan Waddell

with Alice Reeve-Tucker, ‘Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh and Inter-War British Youth: Conflict and Infantilism’, in Andrzej Gąsiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell (eds), 'Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity' (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011): 163-82

by Nathan Waddell

Enemy Lines: Form, Politics and Identity in Wyndham Lewis's One-Way Song

by Ivan Phillips

Published in The Wyndham Lewis Annual, Vol. XII (2005), pp.59-79.

Penmen and Brushmen: the remediation of word and image in the work of Wyndham Lewis and David Jones

by Ivan Phillips

Published (with 13 lovely illustrations) in Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, Vol. 24, No. 1 (January-March, 2008), pp. 103-14. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Apes, Tyros, and Humans: Wyndham Lewis's Portraits

by Thomas Karshan

Love and Politics in Wyndham Lewis's Snooty Baronet

by Stephen E. Lewis

Published in _Modern Language Quarterly_ 61:4 (Dec. 2000): 617-649.