The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis
Monsters of Nature and Design

Relationship between the work of Joyce and Lewis, expressed through similar themes and structures.

Scott W. Klein (Author)

9780521434522, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 October 1994

276 pages
22.4 x 14.4 x 2.1 cm, 0.449 kg

"[Klein's] arrival on the scene is good news for the future of the Joyce industry. He is sharp and energetic and engagingly enthusiastic. He has read everything. He is full of arresting insights." John Gordon, English Language in Transition 1880-1920

The literary relationship of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis has previously been described in merely biographical terms. In The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis Scott W. Klein takes Wyndham Lewis's criticism of Ulysses in Times and Western Man and Joyce's implicit response to Lewis in Finnegans Wake as an emblematic opposition signalling significant textual relations within and between the fictions of the two authors. The seeing eye and the world, the creating mind and fiction, language and its aesthetic and political object, and the processes of history: all appear in the work of both Joyce and Lewis, as related thematic structures that raise questions about binarism, dialectic, and the reconciliation of opposites. Detailed examination of key texts by Joyce and Lewis reveals affiliations between the two writers, and offers insight into the politics and aesthetics of modernism.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction: opposition and representation
1. The tell-tale Eye
2. The mirror and the razor
3. The cracked looking-glass of the master
4. Minds of the anti-collaborators
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]