Wyndham Lewis, Paleface

This is the first ever critical edition of Wyndham Lewis’s Paleface: The Philosophy of the 'Melting-Pot'. It reproduces, with corrections, the text first published by Chatto and Windus in May 1929. Explanatory Notes trace the many sources which Lewis quotes from and alludes to; clear annotations are provided to guide the reader to a nuanced understanding of the book’s cultural and intellectual range. The Afterword describes the historical context of racism against African Americans and explores the nature of Lewis’s position-taking in relation to debates about race in the USA in the 1920s. It also offers a detailed account of the composition of the book, from its first essay form published in Lewis’s journal The Enemy, No. 2 (September 1927), to its revision for publication as a standalone volume, plus a comprehensive analysis of the book’s reception on publication and its subsequent critical reputation. The Textual Appendix collates the text published in 1929 against the version in The Enemy, an essay Lewis published in The Monthly Criterion in July 1927 and incorporated into the Introduction to Part II, and surviving earlier manuscript states of the parts Lewis added to produce the book; it includes a transcription of the post-publication changes which Lewis proposed making to the book for a planned (but never realised) foreign edition. The volume makes possible a fresh re-evaluation of this deeply divisive book praised by T. S. Eliot for its ‘brilliant exposure’ of D. H. Lawrence, acknowledged by some for its pioneering ‘cultural studies’ approach to literary works, but often reviled today for its racist assumptions, language and arguments.