SOURCE: A review of Fables of Aggression, in Modern Language Review, Vol. 77, No. 4, October, 1982, pp. 944-45.

In the following review, Wilding offers a positive assessment of Fables of Aggression.

Fredric Jameson’s study of Wyndham Lewis [Fables of Aggression] is a stimulating and rewarding approach not only to ‘surely the least read and most unfamiliar of all the great modernists of his generation that included the name of Pound and Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence and Yeats’ but also to that whole strand of modernists from Lewis through Lawrence and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, about whose work traditional formal criticism has had little to say. Though focused on Lewis, this approach, using the ‘coordinates’ of ‘ideology, psychoanalysis, narrative analysis’ provides a way into the work of those writers who offer ‘a deliberate provocation of the reader fully as much as they challenge a ritualistic cult of belles lettres or...