Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde

Toby Foshay's penetrating study of Lewis presents a two-pronged argument that will help to lift Lewis from this obscurity. First, he reveals that Lewis is less interested in stylistic and formal innovation than he is committed to artistic, philosophical, and political transformations. As such, Lewis is not a modernist but, in the sense of the term as employed by theoretician Peter Burger, an avant-gardiste. Second, Foshay demonstrates that Lewis's development as an artist is inextricably linked to his avant-garde commitments -- commitments that find their roots in Lewis's reading of Nietzsche. Lewis's fiction and criticism must thus be read, Foshay maintains, as developing interdependently throughout his career and in relation to his evolving interpretation of Nietzsche. Foshay's insightful critique of Lewis's relation to the Modernist movement on the one hand, and of his development as an artist and critic on the other, offers a revised reading not only of Modernism itself but of what Lewis can teach us about the relation of thought to the practice of art in modernity.