The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis

The literary relationship of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis has previously been described in merely biographical terms. In The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis Scott W. Klein takes Wyndham Lewis’s criticism of Ulysses in Times and Western Man and Joyce’s implicit response to Lewis in Finnegans Wake as an emblematic opposition signalling significant textual relations within and between the fictions of the two authors. The seeing eye and the world, the creating mind and fiction, language and its aesthetic and political object, and the processes of history: all appear in the work of both Joyce and Lewis, as related thematic structures that raise questions about binarism, dialectic, and the reconciliation of opposites. Detailed examination of key texts by Joyce and Lewis reveals hitherto unperceived affiliations between the two writers, and offers new insight into the politics and aesthetics of modernism.