SOURCE: "The Experiment of Vorticist Drama: Wyndham Lewis and Enemy of the Stars," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 225-39.

In the following essay, Klein explores the narrative motifs that dominate Vorticist drama.

Wyndham Lewis was the only writer and painter in England during the early part of the twentieth century who was consistently engaged by the continental avant-garde. His movement, vorticism, spearheaded by the 1914 magazine Blast, brought the radicalism of futurism and cubism into British painting and the theoretical concerns of continental manifestos into English writing, proclaiming both the importance of the individual and the artist's freedom from Romantic and Victorian thought. Blast also contains an attempt at vorticist drama, Enemy of the Stars. This prose experiment, comparable in its extravagant unperformability to works by the Russian futurists and Artaud, occupies a crucial position in Lewis's work. The centerpiece of Blast, it attempts to demonstrate...