Apes Of God Research Articles

RECEPTION OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY’S WORK IN THE NOVEL “THE APES OF GOD” BY WYNDHAM LEWIS

The article is devoted to the study of Wyndham Lewis’s perception of Aubrey Beardsley’s graphic and literary works. We apply an aesthetic-poetological method and historical-literary method and biographical method. The comparison of Beardsley’s novels «Under the Hill» and Lewis’s «The Apes of God» is associated with the experience of graphic creativity of the authors, with their interest in Catholicism, with parody and the grotesque. An analysis of direct references to Beardsley in the context of “table talk” and aphorisms of Wilde, Beardsley and Whistler shows that Lewis does not completely deny the experience of the 1890s. Rather Lewis pays a lot of attention to them in the form of reminiscences, following the aesthetics of objectivity. If the era of 1890s is characterized in Lewis’s novel with the help of food metaphors, then the pictures of modernity are created with the help of battle, military vocabulary. Lewis characterizes fictional heroes of the 20th century through the artists of the nineties of the 19th century – Beardsley, Wilde, Whistler, Leverson. If Wilde and Whistler are recognized by Lewis in the artistic world of the novel through Pierpoint, Zagreus and Osmund, then the name of Aubrey Beardsley is more associated with the image of Sib. The heroine of the novel (whose prototype is Ada Leverson) is created through characteristics reminiscent of Beardsley’s drawings, which combine masses of black and white and which are associated with the tradition of the «Fetes Galantes».

Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis: 1923-1925

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between T. S. Eliot, arguably the greatest modernist poet, and Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticist novelist-painter, during the years 1923-1925. This paper mainly focuses on excavating numerous letters both in The Letters of T. S. Eliot 2: 1923-1925 (2009) and in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (1963), delving into the publication processes and evaluation of Lewis’s articles including “Mr. Zagreus and the Split-Man” and “The Apes of God,” which later constitute Lewis’s Vorticist novel, The Apes of God (1930), two essays of “Art Chronicle,” and book reviews published in The Criterion edited by Eliot. The close relationship between Eliot and Lewis is juxtaposed against their ambivalent relationship with the Schiff couple: Sydney and Violet Schiff, with the Sitwell trio: Edith, Osbert, Sacheverell Sitwell, and with Lytton Strachey represented by Bloomsbury, who are satirized in Lewis’s articles. Meanwhile, their volatile relationship or quarrels are engendered by the unsettled discussions on Lewis’s 20,000-word MSS “The Perfect Action” too lengthy to be published in The Criterion, or over contribution payments. In short, the correspondence between Eliot and Lewis, and the novelist’s articles over a period of three years intensively reveal their strong influential interplay and ambivalent relationship ranging from invigorating friendship to antagonistic relationship.

Opposition to the Cinema in Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God

The paper considers the influence of the cinema on the satirical novel The Apes of God (1930) by English modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis as contextualized by its author’s predominantly negative perception of the cinema in his fiction and criticism. For Lewis the critic, the cinema was an embodiment of stereotyped modern popular culture as well as a powerful instrument of ideological control, which erases the differences between individuals and their ways of thinking. Accordingly, in The Apes of God the cinema is represented as an anti-intellectual and anti-aesthetic mass-made cultural product, whose model serves passively mechanical characters satirized by the author as a model for perceiving and interpreting their lives. Conceived as such, the cinema stands in stark contrast with the text of the novel. Detailed metaphorical descriptions of the least significant movements of objects and characters seen from a short distance act as a deliberate literary antithesis to such popular cinema effects as slow motion and close-up. Thus, Lewis’s novel is a consistent articulation of its author’s opposition to the cinema both on the level of content and that of form. Overall, The Apes of God is a characteristic example of aversion to the cinema shared by many English “high” modernist writers.

Wyndham Lewis's ‘Very Bad Thing’: Jazz, Inter-War Culture, and The Apes of God

The relationships between jazz and modernist writing have in recent years increasingly interested musico-literary scholars. Much of this interest centres on links between modernism, jazz, and the Harlem Renaissance, whose music and art extend ‘far beyond its geographic boundaries as well as beyond the relational boundaries of time’. 1 As evidence of this trans-national and trans-temporal influence, especially as it applies to Anglo-American culture, writers like T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and Philip Larkin, among others, have all been considered in relation to jazz and New York in the 1920s and 1930s. 2 Such studies contribute to the growing significance of African-American traditions within modernist scholarship and provide increasingly nuanced pictures of jazz’s impact upon literary modernism (both as creative stimulus and as ‘despised’ phenomenon). However, these interpretations of the jazz ‘influence’ need to be understood as more than a reductive dichotomy. For instance, Fitzgerald was attuned to the prevalence of jazz in twentieth-century modernity, and his jazz allusions ‘anxiously suggest that beneath the surface of [what he saw as] the music’s frivolous gaiety lurks the presence of violence and chaos, which threatens to erupt at any moment.’ 3 Therefore, his complex representations of jazz music–the fact that he wrote about jazz and its cultures so extensively in his fiction and non-fiction in the first place–indicate that he recognised jazz as a specifically modern, observable fact which was crucial to realistic portrayals of inter-war life. In this regard his work, and that

The Unrest Cure According to Lawrence, Saki, and Lewis

This essay examines two sets of pre-Holocaust fantasies, thriving in Edwardian England, that manifested as either vehement anti-Semitism or generalized misanthropy. Although cultural historians can point to reasons for both sets of fantasies, including the 1905 Aliens Act and the xenophobia accompanying the 1911 Sidney Street Siege, a riot in East London, my essay turns instead to fiction such as Saki's short story "The Unrest-Cure," Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, and Lewis's Apes of God, because they invoke a different kind of causality that ties prejudice and misanthropy to impersonal hatred. Arguing that this radical misanthropy helped transform early twentieth-century conceptions of personhood, "The Unrest Cure" assesses whether the resulting agitation guides readers toward new models of sociability or, more austerely, humanity's extinction.

The Poetics of Mockery: Wyndham Lewis's 'The Apes of God' and the Popularization of Modernism

The Poetics of Mockery: Wyndham Lewis's 'The Apes of God' and the Popularization of Modernism

Satire and Aesthetics in Wyndham Lewis' "Apes of God"

As one of men of 1914, Wyndham lived in a violent age, and in the big bloodless brawl prior to Big Blood Letting,' he was widely recognized as a dangerous antagonist. His friend T. E. Hulme had a knuckle-duster carved in brass by Henri GaudierBrzeska, and although did have a legendary fistfight with Hemingway, his brand of violence was not physical; it was rather intellectual and verbal. Lewis conceived world as an arena where various insurrectionary forces struggled to outwit each other in game of artistic power politics.2 entered polemical arena with zeal and defeated Marinetti, futurist, in lecture halls of London, toppled D. H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson in The Enemy, and in Time and Western Man iconoclastically hacked away at reputations of Joyce, Pound, and Gertrude Stein. Revolutionary Simpletons all, they are floored within a few pages by a brilliant rhetorical invective which leaves reader gasping. The titles of Lewis' periodicals, Blast and The Enemy, suggest public persona he adopted, and in his autobiographical poem-sequence, proudly defines his own character: