Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain

Offering the first book-length consideration of Edward Upward (1903-2009), one of the major British left-wing writers, this collection positions his life and works in the changing artistic, social and political contexts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Upwards fiction and non-fiction, from the 1920s onwards, illustrate the thematic and formal richness of left-wing writing during the twentieth-century age of extremes. At the same time, Upwards work shows the inherent tensions of a life committed at once to writing and to politics. The full range of Upwards work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined, including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s, his Marxist fiction of the 1930s, the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy The Spiral Ascent and his formally and thematically innovative later stories. The essays collected here reevaluate Upwards central place in twentieth-century British literary culture and assess his legacy for the twenty-first century. See more