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| Wyndham Lewis: |
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| Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change |
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| Essays on Art, Literature & Society 1914-1956 |
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Edited by Paul Edwards
Illustrations by Wyndham Lewis |
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''Casting himself both as oppositional gadfly and radical utopian, Wyndham Lewis — particularly in his art criticism — outlined the alternatives available to the avant-garde: isolated rejection of the hegemonic culture or self-consciously political intervention in it,'' a 'Village Voice' critic recently observed. ''Shuddering at the possibility of immersion in the shapeless mundane, he articulated an aesthetic of satirical observation and rough-house combat with the real.''
The essays in Creatures of Habit & Creatures of Change, gathered together for the first time from long unavailable periodicals, reflect the full dizzying range of Lewis's interests in art, literature and society. Subjects include Marinetti and Futurism, Picasso, Matisse and Francis Bacon; Matthew Arnold, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; the sense of humor, the function of the arts in society and the length of women's hemlines. Throughout, Lewis's principal critical target is a monolithic, mechanistic, standardized modern society, indifferent to art and the imagination. His prophetic vision of a dehumanized culture in which ''creatures of change'' have been superseded by ''creatures of habit'' will perhaps ring even truer for our time than for his own. |
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...Just as the child puffing along the street is imagining himself a steam engine or a horse — sometimes it seems mixing them into some mythological monster, with a horse's mane behind its funnel and a tail hanging from a coal bunker — so the man for whom the child is the playful father is always imagining himself to be something he is not-such as a bird, Napoleon, a gentleman, a fish, or an adding machine. The principal thing that discriminates men from the other animals is that they desire to escape from themselves. |
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from ''The Politics of Artsitic Expression'', 1924 |
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430 pages, Paperback, 6'' x 9'' (230 x 150 mm)
14 b/w illustrations, English
ISBN: 0-87685-769-1 |
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| $ 15.00 |
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| About the Editor: |
Paul Edwards was born in Colchester, England, in 1950. He attended Cambridge University, and later studied the work of Wyndham Lewis at the universities of Birmingham and London. He has been the editor of 'Enemy News', the Journal of the Wyndham Lewis Society.
Mr. Edwards lives in Cambridge, England. He is a senior lecturer in English at Bath Spa University College. |
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