Negotiating Contradictions: A Review of BLAST at 100

The collection BLAST at 100 makes an admirable attempt to read Wyndham Lewis's BLAST as a single and self-contained text, but ultimately falls short of its ambitions. Essays cover the magazine's two issues as a whole; its individual texts; its connections to other texts, artists, and movements; and practical responses to it, with varying success. The essays on BLAST that fit into the growing field of periodical studies are most useful, and those that analyze individual texts like Rebecca West's "Indissoluble Matrimony" in terms of the magazine as a whole offer a productive model for further work on the magazine. The bulk of the essays, however, do not meet this model's standards and are either too narrow or too broad in scope to adequately address BLAST in itself.