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Item: The Childermass
1928-2000
Book, 20 x 12.9 cm, 401 p, language : English, publisher : Calder Publications /Riverrun Press, London/New York, Series : Modern European Classics From Calder, ISBN : 071454311X.
Materials: Ink, paper
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2026/284).
Literary synopsis
The Childermass is the first volume of the unfinished epic The Human Age (parts two and three came out in the 1950s), is unarguably the most radical, outlandish, and formally experimental work in Lewis’s oeuvre. The novel follows the adventures of two Englishmen, Sattersthwaite and Pullman, presumably killed in the Great War, as they posthumously navigate a bizarre purgatorial afterlife while awaiting admission to something called The Magnetic City.
Lewis in The Childermass spends a good deal of time dramatizing his theoretical, political, and aesthetic concerns. Along the way, he produces extensive parodies of the styles of both James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, while also pushing the inimitable Lewisean sentence he had developed in Tarr to its extreme limits.
Authorship: Artist Author.
Creative Strategy: No Link to Artworks.
Genre: Drama, Science-Fiction.
Publishing: Publishing House.
