The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories

Description

A major addition to Penguin Modern Classics - one of the great British modernists Wyndham Lewis can claim to be one of a tiny handful of British artists who had a European reach and ambition. Creator with Ezra Pound of Vorticism, editor, designer and author of the great art manifesto Blast, a great painter and portraitist, novelist, polemicist and hater of the Bloomsbury movement, through a long life Lewis remained controversial, belligerent and very funny. With Joyce, Eliot and Pound (all of whose definitive portraits he painted) he stood for a heroic engagement with art and literature - and his ultimate (and unique) achievement was to be both a spectacular novelist and a spectacular painter. The Wild Body showcases his most original, daring and entertaining short fiction, mainly written around the time of Blast. In amazing contrast with so much feeble British writing of the period, it shows the heady delight of modernism at full tilt.

Wyndham Lewis was born in 1882 and died in 1957. Before the First World War he was at the heart of the British avant-garde and creator of Vorticism and Blast. He fought in the artillery during the war, a time recalled in his memoir Blasting and Bombadiering. His major novels include Tarr, The Apes of God, Rotting Hill, The Revenge for Love (also now available in Penguin Modern Classics), The Childermass and Self-Condemned. His paintings and drawings are held in many collections around the world, most notably Tate Britain.