Wyndham Lewis, the Novelist

by Timothy Materer

Wyndham Lewis was an art critic, leader of a group of abstract painters, editor, publisher, satirist, philosopher, and so'cial commentator, as' well as a novelist. So various and uneven are his gifts that he must be judged-to avoid his dismissal as a volcanic but burnt-out genius-where his achievement is most vital. In Wyndham Lewis the Novelist, Professor Timothy Materer argues that Lewis, as an artist in prose, was greatest as a novelist, despite the ambiguous fame he won as critic and satirist. Wyndham Lewis the Novelist explores Lewis's art in the divided aims of Tarr, the breakthrough made in Snooty Baronet, the cold but brilliant accomplishment of The Revenge for Love, and the great tragic achievement of his late novel, Self Condemned. The major concerns of this study are satire and tragedy, objectivity and sympathy, and violence in Lewis's fiction. Lewis was the central figure of the group Ezra Pound called the "Vortex," the association of Lewis, Pound, T.S. Eliot, and some of the finest painters and sculptors in pre-World War I England. Professor MatereOr traces the formative impression the Vortex had upon Lewis. Lewis's artistic theories are compared to Eliot's, and the dramatic course of his career to Ezra Pound's. This is the first book on Lewis to commit itself to a comparative estimate of his achievement. It shows that Lewis's conception of satire prevented him from creating characters as vivid and alive as those of James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. But Lewis ranks only just below these two giants, along with novelists such as Ford Madox Ford (whom Lewis resembles) and E.M. Forster. Professor Materer compares Lewis not only to the novelists of the twenties, but he also shows that Lewis's kinship with writers as recent as John Hawkes and Thomas Pynchon reveals the unfailing creative energy of Lewis's career.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814315445
• ISBN13: 9780814315446
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Wayne State U., Detroit
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 9.0"