Blog post

Competition now closed: win Fredric Jameson books to mark new Vorticists exhibition

Tamar Shlaim14 June 2011

To mark the new exhibition, Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, which opens at the Tate Britain today, Verso are giving away Fredric Jameson's classic book, Fables of Agression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, along with two of his other books. 

While Fables of Agression primarily focuses on Wyndham Lewis' novels, Lewis was also the founder of the short-lived avant-garde Vorticist art and poetry movement. Among its other key members were the artists Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and it was also linked with modernist poets Ezra Pound, who gave the movement its name, and T. S Eliot). 

The Tate exhibition focuses on the art of the Vorticist movement and the paintings of Lewis, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, showcased in the only two Vorticist exhibitions ever to have taken place. It also highlights the often overlooked female Vorticists, who included Helen Saunders and Dorothy Shakespear. From the exhibition blurb: 

Vorticism was a radical art movement that shone briefly but brightly in the years before and during World War I. This exhibition celebrates the full electrifying force and vitality of this short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that was based in London but international in make-up and ambition ...

This exhibition aims to shine a new light on this revolutionary group of artists, presenting the style, radical aesthetics and thoughts of one of the most truly avant-garde art movements in British history.

Called "brilliant" and "important" by Edward Said, Fables of Aggression  is a controversial rereading of Lewis, arguing that he was an essentially political writer in a way that some of his modernist peers (Joyce, Yeats, Pound, Eliot) were not. It will be on sale at the Tate bookshop during the exhibition, but you can win a copy, along with two other Jameson titles, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital (not out until next month in the UK) by answering the following question: 

Of whom did Wyndham Lewis say the following? 

As even his very appearance suggests, there is nothing whatever eccentric about him. He is not only satisfied with, but enthusiastically embraces his typicalness. So you get in him, cut out in the massive simple lines of a peasant art, the core of the teutonic character. 

There are four prizes in total—two for US entrants and two for entrants from the rest of the world. Winners will be the first two people to email the answer to each of the addresses below. 

Answers by email only please, with "Wyndham Lewis competition" in the subject line. 

If you are based in the US/Canada email: verso@versobooks.com

If you are based outside the US/Canada email: enquiries@verso.co.uk. 

Please don't post the answer on twitter or facebook—entries won't be eligible.