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Print Price: $16.50

Format:
Paperback
400 pp.
1 map, 129 mm x 196 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199567201

Publication date:
October 2010

Imprint: OUP UK

Tarr

Wyndham Lewis
Edited by Scott W. Klein

Series : Oxford World's Classics

'The nearest the general run get to art is Action: sex is their form of art: the battle for existence is their picture.'

Tarr tells the blackly comic story of the lives and loves of two artists, played out against the backdrop of Paris before the start of the First World War - the English enfant terrible Frederick Tarr, and the middle-aged German Otto Kreisler, a failed painter who finds himself in a widening spiral of militaristic self-destruction. When both become interested in the same two women - Bertha Lunken, a conventional German, and Anastasya Vasek, the ultra-modern international devotee of 'swagger sex' - Wyndham Lewis sets the stage for a scathing satire of national and social pretensions, the fraught relationship between men and women, and the incompatibilities of art and life.

In his introduction and notes Scott W. Klein explores Lewis's stylistic experimentation within the context of avant-garde movements in painting, and offers new insights into Tarr as a work of mordent wit and enduringly ferocious irony.

Readership : Readers of modern fiction, especially those interested in Modernism and the avant-garde, and the relationship between art and literature, readers of satire; students of English Literature, twentieth-century literature and fiction, Modernism, the novel; interdisciplinary courses bridging art and literature.

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Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was an artist, novelist, and critic. He was the leader of the Vorticist movement in art and, with Ezra Pound, edited the only two issues of Blast, the great manifesto of the modern art movement and one of the seminal texts of twentieth-century modernism. As well as Tarr, Lewis's novels include The Apes of God and 'IThe Revenge for Love.

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Special Features

The only available edition of Wyndham Lewis's major Modernist novel, and the first critical edition based on Lewis's revised, final text.
Set in Paris on the eve of the First World War, Tarr's story and style reflect Lewis's views on art and literature, a reflection both of the Vorticist movement in art and the literary experimentalism of Modernism.
Scott W. Klein's introduction places the novel in the context of social satire and the avant-garde, especially the artistic developments of the 1910s including Cubism, Futurism, and Lewis's own movement, Vorticism, and explores the links between Tarr and other Modernist masterpieces.
Comprehensive notes and a glossary of foreign words and phrases in the novel.
An Appendix reprints Lewis's Preface to the 1918 American edition.
Includes a map of Paris to assist readers with the action of the novel.