It has always been difficult to determine Wyndham Lewis's position within the Modernist movement. Despite his status as one of the "big five" modernists -- along with W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce -- Lewis is the least read and least understood of significant modern English writers. At once both modernist and anti-modernist -- Lewis was a founder, before the First World War, of Vorticism and a critic, after the war, of what he considered modernism's sell-out to the art establishment -- he has remained the most obscure and the least easily categorized of the canonical modernists.

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.

Making a strong case for a revaluation of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), this collection argues that significant aspects of Lewis's writing, painting, and thinking have not yet received the attention they deserve. The contributors explore Lewis's contributions to the production and circulation of modernism and assess the links between Lewis's writing and painting and the work of other key contemporary figures, to position Lewis not only as one of the first twentieth-century cultural critics but also as one who anticipated the work of the Frankfurt School and other social theorists. Familiar topics and themes such as Vorticism receive fresh appraisals, and Lewis's significance as a philosopher-critic, novelist, and artist becomes fully realized in the context of his associations with important figures such as John Rodker, Charlie Chaplin, Evelyn Waugh, Naomi Mitchison, and Rebecca West. Lewis emerges as a figure whose writings on politics, corporate patronage, shell shock, anthropology, art, and cinema extend their influence into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Making a strong case for a revaluation of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), this collection argues that significant aspects of Lewis's writing, painting, and thinking have not yet received the attention they deserve. The contributors explore Lewis's contributions to the production and circulation of modernism and assess the links between Lewis's writing and painting and the work of other key contemporary figures, to position Lewis not only as one of the first twentieth-century cultural critics but also as one who anticipated the work of the Frankfurt School and other social theorists. Familiar topics and themes such as Vorticism receive fresh appraisals, and Lewis's significance as a philosopher-critic, novelist, and artist becomes fully realized in the context of his associations with important figures such as John Rodker, Charlie Chaplin, Evelyn Waugh, Naomi Mitchison, and Rebecca West. Lewis emerges as a figure whose writings on politics, corporate patronage, shell shock, anthropology, art, and cinema extend their influence into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.