At the fag-end of
literary criticism, when all major authors have been exhaustively analyzed,
four kinds of books are being written: rare original critiques, variations of
existing ideas, thinly disguised repetitions of what has already been said[,] and
sterile infatuations with structuralism and semiotics. In this decadent context
a thoroughly researched biography, which is firmly based on extensive archival
evidence and presents a massive quantity of new material as the basis for
original interpretations, is perhaps the most valuable contribution to modern
scholarship.
—Jeffrey
Meyers in his chapter on Wyndham Lewis in The
Craft of Literary Biography
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