Ideological Text-Worlds in Wyndham Lewis’s Hitler (1931) and The Jews, Are They Human? (1939): A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

The current paper examines the application of text-world theory to Wyndham Lewis’s fascist writings, particularly Hitler (1931) and The Jews, Are They Human? (1939). In these polemical works, Lewis builds immersive ideological “text-worlds” that mirrors authoritarian and exclusionary viewpoints, portraying his contentious political beliefs of the 1930s. Applying text-world theory as an analytical structure, this study unravels how Lewis’s language creates cognitive spaces where readers are placed within a perspective that accentuates order, hierarchy, and social purity. By setting a deictic center that is anchored in authoritarian values, Lewis immerses readers in text-worlds where hierarchical authority is represented as natural and desirable. Key text-world techniques, such as metaphor, epistemic modality, and counterfactuality, are shown to strengthen ideological themes by shaping social barriers and presenting in-groups as morally superior. The paper, then, analyzes Lewis’s deictic centering and metaphorical language, which construct social purity and contamination as oppositional forces within the text-world.