3 Review(s)

This book examines the relation between the aesthetic convictions and political opinions of the Anglo-American modernists, focusing on the collaboration of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. In the years before World War I, Pound and Lewis were the forces behind the Vorticist movement, and edited the avant-garde journal "Blast". Sherry's book asks: how do we account for their simultaneous development of highly experimental forms in verse, prose, and paint, and their parallel movements in later years toward the German and Italian parties of European fascism? Making use of research on European writers (e.g. Henri Bergson Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Georges Sorel) on Modernism, and proposes an understanding of ideology as a force in the literary imagination.