In the stories of Joyce, Woolf and Mansfield, there is a substantial common ground in terms of method and effect; and, for each writer, formal dissonance is both a yardstick of generic innovation and a vital key to interpretation. All three writers, in their different ways, expand the short story form to incorporate and express a complex view of the interaction between individual experience and social organization. There is, however, a different side to the modernist preoccupation with personality and its social definition, a starker view typified in the short stories of Wyndham Lewis. This starker view is bound up with Lewis's aesthetic goals, and these are given direct formal expression in his major collection of stories, The Wild Body, published in 1927.

The collection displays the typical modernist preoccupation with literary form and artifice, but the use it makes of form and convention betrays an attitude to personality, and to society, which is quite different from that expressed in the works discussed so far. The book is representative of the dichotomous view of art as rarefied activity – satirized in Mansfield's ‘Je ne Parle pas Français’. An analysis of the Wyndham Lewis collection, then, will contribute to a broader account of modernism, and, in the process, will provide an alternative test for the analytical approach to the short story propounded in previous chapters: where the stories of Joyce, Woolf and Mansfield make overtly disruptive gestures – designed to establish connections between text and context – we might expect the Wyndham Lewis stories to betray an opposite tendency, designed to buttress the authority and distinctiveness of the literary discourse.