8 - Wyndham Lewis and modernist satire

Summary

Lewis’s alternative modernism

The inclusion of Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957) in this Companion reflects a significant shift in our conception of the modernist novel over the past fifteen years. Although Lewis himself has frequently appeared as a major personality in narratives of modernism, his literary works have not had the wide readership of the novels of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf. Since the mid-1990s, however, Lewis’s work has been cited in mainstream modernist studies with increasing regularity. This can be explained in part by the Black Sparrow Press’s republication of Lewis’s work, a large proportion of which had been out of print since its first publication. In addition, although many of Lewis’s novels existed only on the margins of the modernist canon, they had over the intervening years accumulated a strong body of scholarly material generated by a small group of dedicated scholars, on which recent criticism has built. Finally, changes in modernist studies, and indeed in literary studies more generally, have created a congenial climate for Lewis’s work.

Lewis’s writing is no longer the aberration it evidently appeared to many in 1954, when Hugh Kenner defended Lewis’s inclusion in Methuen’s 'The Makers of Modern Literature' series as follows:

No historian’s model of the age of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound is intelligible without Lewis in it. More than any of these men, whose craft functioned with comparative freedom within the time, Lewis reveals the time’s nature. He does this as much by disregarding nearly everything the artist is officially supposed to undertake, as by succeeding - so far as he has succeeded - in what he chose to do instead.