Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism

"Vincent Sherry has the gift of never writing an uninteresting page in Pound, Lewis, and Radical Modernism. It is impossible in a brief note to capture the richness of this lucidly, gracefully written book, which, among other things, is surely the most thorough and original study of the influence of Wyndham Lewis on Pound."--American Literary Scholarship "Admirably clear and direct....Distinguished not only by a sophisticated understanding of a neglected strain of modernist theory but also by careful scholarship that draws on important unpublished material. But the book's chief distinction is its challenging, and sometimes radically new, readings of Lewis's fiction and Pound's poetry."--Journal of English and Germanic Philology "Vincent Sherry's book raises one of the most important questions about modernism: what is the relationship of avant-garde technology to retrograde politics in the work of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis? Sherry's answer involves a meticulous examination of a hitherto ignored aspect of modernist ideology: its derivation from the anti-humanism of such continental philosophers as Julien Benda, Ortega y Gasset, and Remy de Gourmont. How this pessimistic anti-humanism, with its advocacy of the Visual over the Vocal, the image over the verbal-musical model of an earlier modernism, informed Pound and Lewis's writings in the 1920s, is Sherry's story and he tells it beautifully."--Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University "Vincent Sherry's thoughtful and lucid study engages many of the central problems of high modernism. His work is marked by an unusual breadth of concern and a welcome freedom from dogmatic certainties."--Michael André Bernstein, University of California, Berkeley "Vincent Sherry has given us a probing inquiry into the relations between aesthetic practice and authoritarian politics in the work of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Without oversimplifying the issues or the artists' careers, he shows how their desire to privilege the visual over the auditory led to fascist conclusions that had been anticipated in Continental ideology; and he traces the complex struggles in their work that followed from their belated recognitions of the inadequacy of that correlation of the aesthetic and the social. This is a book that will have to be taken into account by future discussions of modernist poetics."--Thomas R. Whitaker, Yale University "Sherry's sustained attention to ideologie marks an important innovation in contemporary literary study....This book should have important implications for the future conduct of modernist studies."--Paideuma "Admirably clear and direct.... Distinguished not only by a sophisticated understanding of a neglected strain of modernist theory but also by careful scholarship that draws on important unpublished material. But the book's chief distinction is its challenging, and sometimes radically new, readings of Lewis's fiction and Pound's poetry."--Journal of English and Germanic Philology "Vincent Sherry's book raises one of the most important questions about modernism: what is the relationship of avant-garde technology to retrograde politics in the work of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis? Sherry's answer involves a meticulous examination of a hitherto ignored aspect of modernist ideology: its derivation from the anti-humanism of such continental philosophers as Julien Benda, Ortega y Gasset, and Remy de Gourmont. How this pessimistic anti-humanism, with its advocacy of the Visual over the Vocal, the image over the verbal-musical model of an earlier modernism, informed Pound and Lewis's writings in the 1920s, is Sherry's story and he tells it beautifully."--Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University "Vincent Sherry's thoughtful and lucid study engages many of the central problems of high modernism. His work is marked by an unusual breadth of concern and a welcome freedom from dogmatic certainties."--Michael André Bernstein, University of California, Berkeley "Vincent Sherry has given us a probing inquiry into the relations between aesthetic practice and authoritarian politics in the work of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Without oversimplifying the issues or the artists' careers, he shows how their desire to privilege the visual over the auditory led to fascist conclusions that had been anticipated in Continental ideology; and he traces the complex struggles in their work that followed from their belated recognitions of the inadequacy of that correlation of the aesthetic and the social. This is a book that will have to be taken into account by future discussions of modernist poetics."--Thomas R. Whitaker, Yale University "Vincent Sherry has the gift of never writing an uninteresting page in Pound, Lewis, and Radical Modernism. It is impossible in a brief note to capture the richness of this lucidly, gracefully written book, which, among other things, is surely the most thorough and original study of the influence of Wyndham Lewis on Pound."--American Literary Scholarship "Sherry's sustained attention to ideologie marks an important innovation in contemporary literary study.... This book should have important implications for the future conduct of modernist studies."--Paideuma