Jameson’s controversial reading of one of the great twentieth-century writers

The novels of Wyndham Lewis have generally been associated with the work of the great modernists – Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats – who were his sometime friends and collaborators. Lewis’s originality, however, is born of the fact that, unlike these writers, he was in essence a political novelist. Fredric Jameson proposes a framework in which Lewis’s explosive language practice can be grasped as a symbolic and political act.

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy.