Wyndham Lewis Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Andrea Freud Lowenstein

Critical Essay by Andrea Freud Lowenstein

SOURCE: “The Molten Column Within: Wyndham Lewis,” in Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene, New York University Press, 1993, pp. 119-87.

In the following excerpt, Lowenstein presents a detailed analysis of Lewis's body of work to identify Lewis as a misogynist, nazi, and homophobe.

Introduction: Why Study Wyndham Lewis

One could argue that to begin the main body of this book with an indepth examination of the life and work of self-proclaimed “Enemy” Wyndham Lewis hardly promises a balanced approach. As Fredric Jameson puts it in his Fables of Aggression:

The polemic hostility to feminism, the uglier misogynist fantasies embedded in his narratives, the obsessive phobia against homosexuals, the most extreme restatements of grotesque traditional myths and attitudes—such features, released by Lewis's particular sexual politics … are not likely to endear him to the contemporary reader.¹

Were this an attempt at a...
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