Wyndham Lewis and Western Man

Wyndham Lewis was an artist, novelist and critic whose work had affinities with such writers of the 1930s as Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence but his asssociation with the British Fascist Party inevitably distanced him from his contemporaries. This book traces the concept of self in Lewis' work.

---

Wyndham Lewis was an artist, novelist and critic. His work has affinities with many writers of the 1930s such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence but his asssociation with the British Fascist Party inevitably distanced him from his contemporaries. This book traces the concept of self in Lewis' work. It discovers that at the heart of his work is a tension between his assumption that the self is really almost nothing at all, and his perception that the survival of European culture - Western Man - depends on the stability and coherence of the self. Lewis' work is dominated by the convictions that industrialized society enslaves by fragmenting and destroying selfhood. In Lewis' mythology, Western Man is opposed to the Jewish "split-man", and Hitler represents the last stand of the West against Jewish-inspired liberalism and communism. This book is designed to be of interest to students of literature and language.