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| Wyndham Lewis: |
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| The Revenge for Love |
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Edited with Afterword and Notes by Reed Way Dasenbrock
Illustrations by Wyndham Lewis |
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This is Wyndham Lewis's best novel, or as he put it himself in a letter to his publisher in 1936, it ''is probably the best complete work of fiction I have written.'' Many readers, including Hugh Kenner, have seconded Lewis's judgment that The Revenge for Love is Lewis's greatest novel. Set in Spain and in Britain just before the Spanish Civil War, the book grabs you from the first page and never lets go. It is both a sophisticated thriller about the political struggle in Spain and a meditation on the ethical value of political parties and action. The novel begins and closes with the protagonist, the Communist Percy Hardcaster, in a Spanish prison. The world outside of prison, which Percy inhabits between arrests, is dominated by art forgery in London, atrocity propaganda, arms smuggling, and the manipulation of appearances in every respect. Percy is in some ways an autobiographical character, though also an object of satire, and he grows in stature as he begins to see through the veil of appearances created by the forgers and fakers.
The original publisher of the novel, Cassell's, shy about Lewis's ''indecencies,'' arranged for a pre-publication reading by a representative of Boot's Circulating Library (a retail drugstore chain). Cassell's then demanded cuts by Lewis in the narrative and requested that the title be changed from the original 'False Bottoms,' a reference to the string of trickeries lurking underneath the surface throughout the book. The Boots ''reader'' was worried his customers might be put off by interpreting the title as hindquarters. Lewis, under considerable financial pressure, made these and other cuts, but they distort the tone and style of the novel. This edition is the first to go back to the manuscript version and to restore Lewis's original text as he intended it to be published. |
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400 pages, 6'' x 9'' (230 x 150 mm)
8 b/w illustrations, English |
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| Paperback |
ISBN: 0-87685-828-0 |
$ 18.00 |
| Cloth Trade |
ISBN: 0-87685-829-9 |
$ 25.00 |
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| About the Editor: |
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Reed Way Dasenbrock is an Associate Professor of English at New Mexico State University, where he has taught since completing his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1981. He is the author of 'The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). He has also published essays on Wyndham Lewis in 'Blast 3' and 'Enemy News'. His current projects include a book of interviews with world writers in English and a book on the politics of modernism.
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