9781844672790-frontcover

Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist

by Fredric Jameson

Jameson’s controversial reading of one of the great twentieth-century writers.

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.

Paperback, 190 pages

ISBN: 9781844672790

August 2008

$34.95 / £19.99

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Reviews

  • Jameson's little book on Wyndham Lewis is an important and in many ways brilliant work, as much for its treatment of Lewis himself as for its two other important contributions: to an understanding of the ideology of modernism, and to an understanding of a socio-political-psychoanlaytic theory of criticism ... Jameson is sensitive both to detail and to the larger intellectual and political issues raised by a writer like Lewis. ... He provides a serious, challenging, and extremely intelligent alternative to the reigning ahistorical formalist criticism.

    – Edward Said

  • A highly original study on the novels of Wyndham Lewis. ... The book is supremely important as a contribution to Marxist criticism especially. It is ironic that it took a critic whose ideological position was so opposed to his subject to offer the best assessment of the ideological and literary bases of Lewis's creativity. ... This is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of postmodernism.

    – Hayden White

Blog

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

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.

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By Tamar Shlaim / 14 June 2011 / 7 comments

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