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Jonathan Bowden’s Reactionary Modernism

Jonathan Bowden
Reactionary Modernism
Edited by Greg Johnson
San-Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2022
204 pages

Reactionary Modernism is Jonathan Bowden’s fourth collection of essays and speeches released by Counter-Currents Publishing. Reactionary Modernism comes in three formats:

1. Hardcover: $35 (add $13 for postage to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, & the Far East)
2. Paperback: $20 (add $13 for postage to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, & the Far East)
3. E-book: $5

The easiest way to order Reactionary Modernism is with e-check:

For other payment options — credit card, bank transfer, paper check, crypto, etc. — email [email protected].

About Reactionary Modernism: 

“Let us return to tradition to go forwards with modernity in a different direction.”—Jonathan Bowden

Since the Second World War, “modernism” in the arts has been overwhelmingly associated with the cultural and political Left. But before the War, there was vigorous debate between modernists of the Right and the Left.

Jonathan Bowden was a latter-day reactionary modernist in both literature and the visual arts. Reactionary Modernism collects Bowden’s lectures and essays on such great reactionary modernist artists as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Arno Breker, as well as his criticisms of the degenerate modernism of Stewart Home and the Turner Prize.

For Bowden, the reactionary modernists of the past were not merely of historical interest, for by returning to tradition, Bowden hoped to inspire an artistic renaissance on the Right.

Praise for Reactionary Modernism:

“In Reactionary Modernism the incomparable Jonathan Bowden shows that Modernism and the Right are not mutually exclusive. But die-hard Traditionalists need not be angry or anxious, for Bowden opens the way for a Rightist Modernism that is nonetheless predicated on Tradition and the race-soul, promoting the continuing development of culture-forms that reject both conservative stagnation and revolutionary deconstruction.”

—Kerry Bolton, author of Artists of the Right

CONTENTS

Editor’s Preface by Greg Johnson

1. Opening Pandora’s Box: An Elitist Defense of Modernism
2. On Modern Art
3. Elitism, British Modernism, & Wyndham Lewis
4. Wyndham Lewis’ Childermass: Black Metal, without the Music
5. Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God
6. Wyndham Lewis’ Tarr: An Exercise in Right-Wing Psychology
7. Ezra Pound
8. T. S. Eliot: Ultra-Conservative Dandy
9. T. S. Eliot
10. W. B. Yeats
11. Zeus Hangs Hera at the World’s Edge: Arno Breker & the Pursuit of Perfection
12. Stewart Home: Communism, Nihilism, Neoism, & Decadence
13. Stewart Home & Cultural Communism
14. Against the Turner Prize

Index

About the Author

JONATHAN BOWDEN, April 12, 1962–March 29, 2012, was a British novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, actor, and orator, as well as a leading thinker and spokesman of the British New Right. He was the author of some forty books—novels, short stories, plays for stage and screen, philosophical dialogues and essays, and literary and cultural criticism—including Pulp Fascism: Right-Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Popular Literature, ed. Greg Johnson (Counter-Currents, 2013); Western Civilization Bites Back, ed. Greg Johnson (Counter-Currents, 2014); and Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics, ed. Greg Johnson (Counter-Currents, 2017).