Wyndham Lewis: Religion and Modernism

Abstract

During a career stretching nearly half a century, Wyndham Lewis was acknowledged as one of the masters of literary modernism by such contemporaries as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. But because his early work was often written in an experimental style, and the major work of his later years was a theological fantasy, he remains among the least known writers of his generation. An apparent anti-humanistic strain in Lewis's outlook has also worked against his acceptance into the modernist canon. Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) is a key figure in the development of Anglo-American modernism, the late 19th/early20th century artistic movement that chanllenged traditional forms and aesthetics in the visual and literary arts. Most critics of Lewis have assumed that his major preoccupations were aesthetics and politics and have proceeded to argue for or against his anti-humanistic art and his interest in totalitarianism. Schenker traces the development of Lewis's career by analyzing a neglected but consistently present trait in his work his preoccupation with religion.