SOURCE: “Blasting the Bombardier: Another Look at Lewis, Joyce, and Woolf,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 365-78.

In the following excerpt, Anspaugh examines Lewis's critical reaction to the writings of Virgina Woolf and James Joyce.

It has been with considerable shaking in my shoes … that I have taken the cow by the horns in this chapter.

(Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art 140)

In her essay “Jellyfish and Treacle: Lewis, Joyce, Gender and Modernism,” Bonnie Kime Scott—leader of what she herself terms “the current wave of Joyce feminist criticism” (169)—offers an analysis of two modernisms: a “male modernism,” as she puts it, embodied in the person and works of Wyndham Lewis, and a female modernism, best represented by Virginia Woolf. “I hope to demonstrate,” Scott says,

how Joyce coincides with some of Lewis's definitions early in his career, and how he and Lewis parted company in...