In 1919, the painter-novelist and impresario Wyndham Lewis reflected on a major stylistic sea-change: 'the Victorian age' he wrote, produced a morass of sugary comfort and amiableness, indulged men so much that they became guys of sentimentor sentimental guys. Against this "sentimentality" people of course reacted. So the brutal tap was turned on. For fifty years it will be the thing to be brutal, "unemotional." 1 Recently home from the trenches, where he had worked as war artist for the British governmentand grimly subdued by what he found therethe high modernist Lewis made his claim dispassionately. In the previous decade, he implied, he and his contemporaries had written brutally and unsentimentally because the slush of the late nineteenth century left them no choice. The switch was inevitable rather than inspired, a latest development in the natural ebb and flow of artistic taste and fashion. 'The "movement" in art', he wrote 'like the attitude of the community to art, is not a thing to be superior about, though it is a thing you may be superior to'. 2 Less than ten years on from his salons with Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme and others, and only five after his Vorticist manifesto Blast, Lewis was suggesting high modernism as the literary symptom of an anti-sentimentalist fever that had taken hold in the West, and that he believed would endurewhether writers and artists liked it or notuntil the 1960s. This special issue responds to Lewis' hypothesis, attempting a survey of literary modernism from the early 1910s until the Second World War that tests the 'brutal' and 'unemotional' shift he describes. Though it doesn't necessarily follow him in down playing modernist artistic inspiration, it asks a set of questions suggested by his statement: how did language and attitudes harden from early century modernism onwards? How did modernists' subject matter
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