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. Upwarda€?s 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, Upwarda€?s work shows the inherent tensions of a life committed at once to writing and to politics. The full range of Upwarda€?s work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined, including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s, his Marxist fiction of the 1930s, the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy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 Upwarda€?s central place in twentieth-century British literary culture and assess his legacy for the twenty-first century.

Benjamin Kohlmann is Assistant Professor of English at Freiburg University, Germany, having previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. His most recent articles have been published in ELH, PMLA, and Modernism/Modernity.