Read more
Part of the
Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis critical edition, which brings together all of Wyndham Lewis's published writings for the first time, this is a scholarly edition of an inflammatory political tract, written by a controversial English modernist writer and painter, which has much relevance to the contemporary moment.
List of contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Series Introduction
- Left Wings Over Europe, Or How to Make a War about Nothing (1936)
- Notes on the Way, Time and Tide, XVI. no.9, March 2nd 1935
- Notes on the Way, Time and Tide, XVI, no.10, March 9th 1935
- Notes on the Way, Time and Tide, XVI, no.11, March 16th 1935
- Notes on the Way, Time and Tide, XVI, no.12, March 23th 1935
- Notes on the Way, Time and Tide, XVI, no.13, March 30th 1935
- Freedom that Destroys Itself, The Listener, XIII, no. 330 May 1935
- First Aid for the Unorthodox, The London Mercury, XXXII, no.187 (May) 27-32 1935
- Abbreviations
- Afterword
- Explanatory Notes
- Textual Appendix
- Textual Notes
- Chronology
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Udith Dematagoda is a modernist literary scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of Stuttgart. He took his PhD in English from The University of Glasgow, and was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz, and Assistant Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo based in WIAS. He specialises in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, modernist European fiction of the 1920s and 1930s with a particular focus on fascist modernism, and aesthetic theory.
Summary
The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis brings together for the first time all of the published writings of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), a major contributor to literary modernism and one of the most important British painters of the first half of the twentieth century.
Composed hastily and with little foresight as to its potential consequences, Left Wings Over Europe: or How to Make a War about Nothing was published in 1936. The book is one of three works of political invective written by Wyndham Lewis against the international order of the western powers, the Soviet Union, and sympathetic towards the fascist regimes in Italy and Nazi Germany. Lewis's interest in political writing emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, where he had served as an artillery officer and official war artist. Motivated by this experience all of his subsequent non-fictional works were in some sense 'anti-war', and Left Wings is no exception. Though replete with a range of mercurial analysis and somewhat agitated in tone, this work and the related essays and articles preceding it collected together for the first time, provide a highly subjective yet fascinating contemporary account of the day-to-day diplomatic crises and political struggles that defined Europe in the mid-1930s.
