Wyndham Lewis: modernism and the new radical right

Gilfedder, Luke ORCID: 0009-0006-2568-8675 (2025). Wyndham Lewis: modernism and the new radical right. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This study examines the influential and often overlooked relationship between literary modernism and today’s radical reactionary ideology, enabling scholars to better understand and critically engage the New Radical Right’s metapolitical influence in today’s political-cultural landscape. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, it reimagines him as an intellectual contemporary, demonstrating how his 'reactionary modernist' inclinations are paradoxically interwoven with his critiques of revolutionary utopianism, organic nationalism, and modernist absolutism. By applying Lewis’s ‘insider-critique’ of reactionary modernism to the New Radical Right's 'alternative modernism', this study sheds new light on Lewis’s original meaning and argues for an urgent re-evaluation of his political legacy.

Utilising a transhistorical method, the study analyses reactionary modernism and the New Radical Right as successive iterations of Romanticism’s ‘anti-enlightenment’ revolt against Enlightenment values. This analysis, conducted in Part One, establishes the theoretical background for Part Two's focus on Lewis’s critique of this conservative revolutionary impulse within modernism. It finds that while Lewis shared his contemporaries' yearning to transform a rationalised world through radical cultural change, his postmodern scepticism of such desires—alongside his ‘neo-classical’ metaphysical concerns about the relation of a radically transcendent Absolute to a limited humanity—led him to advocate for a positive rational vision: one that embraces modern individualism, celebrates universal cosmopolitanism, and upholds art over ‘resacralised’ politics as a religion for postmodern man. In doing so, Lewis presents a third way between postmodern nihilism and modernist absolutism.

By tracing the development of this idea across Lewis’s career—particularly in his understudied post-fascist work—and analysing it in the context of the New Radical Right, this study not only challenges the reductive interpretation of Lewis as merely reactionary but also offers a significant reassessment of his relevance to contemporary affairs.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):