The agon of modernism

the long version

"This book is a detailed analysis of Wyndham Lewis's allegories, aesthetics, and politics that identifies him as a central figure of modernism. Modernism is defined as a movement caught between the avant-garde's radical rejection of the status quo and the awareness of tradition, be it philosophical, political, religious, or artistic. The tension between radicalism and tradition causes modernist texts to be self-contradictory."--BOOK JACKET. "Lewis's political writings present ambiguities: his stated belief in the autonomy of art from life is contradicted by other statements he made and by his critical analyses of writers; and his political writings blur any a priori generic distinction between art and non-art. Given this blurring between art and life, artistic genre and non-artistic genre, Quema claims that Lewis's political texts present characteristics usually attributed to avant-gardism. However, this radicalism has to be balanced against Lewis's conservatism. Thus his political writings can be read as allegories with two pragmatic aims: to organize the life of the polis from an artistic standpoint and to persuade the reader to adhere to authoritarian politics."--BOOK JACKET.