The novels of Wyndham Lewis have generally been associated with the work of the great modernists-Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats-who were his sometime friends and collaborators. Lewis's originality, however, can only be fully grasped when it is understood that, unlike those writers, he was essentially a political novelist. In this now classic study, Fredric Jameson proposes a framework in which Lewis's explosive language practice-utterly unlike any other English or American modernism-can be grasped as a political and symbolic act. He does not, however, ask us to admire the energy of Lewis's style without confronting the inescapable and often scandalous ideological content of Lewis's works: the aggressivity and sexism, the predilection for racial and national categories, the brief flirtation with fascism, and the inveterate and cranky oppositionalism that informs his powerful polemics against virtually all the political and countercultural tendencies of his time. Fables of Aggression draws on the methods of narrative analysis and semiotics, psychoanalysis, and ideological analysis to construct a dynamic model of the contradictions from which Lewis's incomparable narrative corpus is generated, and of which it offers so many varying symbolic resolutions.

Wyndham Lewis was equally talented as a writer and a painter. Providing an overview of the visual, literary and philosophical dimensions of Lewis's work, Edwards also considers them as an integrated whole. He also discusses Lewis's fascist sympathies.

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), the self-styled 'Enemy', was arguably the most significant British artist-writer of the twentieth century. As well as creating a unique oeuvre of paintings and drawings, he wrote short stories, novels, essays and books on philosophy, literature, politics and cultural criticism. A draughtsman of exceptional skill and verve, he also pioneered cutting-edge modernism in Britain before the First World War, leading the Vorticist movement and editing its typographically startling journal Blast. Lewis, along wth figures including and sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska and poet Ezra Pound, turned London into an international 'vortex' of creative activity. His cultural revolution was brought to a halt by the First World War, in which he served as an artillery officer and as a major official war artist.

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a British novelist, painter, essayist, and polemicist. Credited with being the founder of the only modernist movement from Britain, Vorcticism, Lewis approached politics as an aesthetic discipline. His 1931 work Hitler was written after his visit to Germany that year, and highlights the charged atmosphere and uneasy tension that permeated Berlin. Bringing his wit and humor to analyze a country on the eve of revolution, Lewis argues that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler may truly be the best option for Germans. Branded a National Socialist sympathizer - Wyndham Lewis's reputation never recovered from the release of this book. Even later disavowals in The Hitler Cult and The Jews, Are They Human? (both in 1939) failed to restore his image. Throughout the 1930's Wyndham Lewis persisted in his advocacy of what is now termed "appeasement". During the war, he fled to the United States and Canada, all the while working to distance himself from his 1931 writings. His later work began explicitly praising a radical individualism which had been ever-present, but never before at the forefront. He returned home to England after the war, and went blind in 1951, but kept writing critiques and fiction of such quality that he had a brief renaissance of popularity before his death in 1957. Despite this, the shadow of Hitler continues to haunt the legacy of Wyndham Lewis. Antelope Hill is proud to release Wyndham Lewis's Hitler, in print for the first time since 1972, with an original foreword by John "Borzoi" Chapman, so that the reader can judge for himself the character of this unique artist.

Making a strong case for a revaluation of Wyndham Lewis, this collection argues that significant aspects of Lewis's writing, painting and thinking have not yet received the attention they deserve. Lewis's contributions to the production and circulation of modernism and the links between Lewis's writing and painting are explored in the context of other key figures of the twentieth century.