Of these four writers, the first three are well known. Wyndham Lewis was a modernist artist and writer who inspired Vorticism, a radical art movement, before the First World War. He was also a novelist: Tarr in 1918, The Childermass in 1928 and The Revenge for Love in 1937 – this last about the months before the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell is best known for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but also had a vigorous political and literary career in the 1930s: he fought in Spain in early 1937 before returning to write Homage to Catalonia (1938), and was a busy critic of Soviet communism. Will Self (b. 1961) is a novelist, satirist and cultural commentator whose fiction is both modernist and a critique of our oppressed present. His three most recent novels, Umbrella (2012), Shark (2014) and Phone (2017) are worth your attention. The fourth writer is scarcely known: he is from Plymouth (where I live), and a friend of mine who has published several books. As I hope to show, the poetry of Steve Spence may be less known, but is a modernism very significant for the present.

My talk will try to set up a relationship between early modernism (Lewis) and recent modernist developments (Self and Spence), with Orwell as a mediating non-modernist figure. Lewis as visual artist broke up the world around him, and as a novelist rejected the inner life of characters in favour of an external approach. Orwell’s two great books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are concerned with power and the defeat of individuals and communities, but treats his characters’ inward lives conventionally. Self is a contemporary modernist who returns to exploration of the inner life within culture, and has a particular interest in the psyche, which he usually understands as broken up. Spence engages with language and identity in a special disintegrative way, as we shall see. All these writers are concerned by the presence of dominant structures in European social and political life, and I shall try to relate their writing to this.

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Dr Alan Munton is sufficiently old to be an Honorary researcher in the English Department at the University of Exeter. He completed the first doctorate written on Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) at Cambridge University in 1976. He has written a bibliography, Seven Writers of the English Left 1916-1980 with Alan Young; a critical book, English Fiction of the Second World War; and an edition, The Collected Poems and Plays of Wyndham Lewis. He has written often for Poetry Nation Review (or PNR) on recent poetry; and has published numerous articles and reviews around modernism and recent literature. He is not (quite) a theorist.