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 The full range of Upward’s work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined, including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s, his Marxist fiction of the 1930s, the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy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

Contents: Writing of the struggle: an introduction to Edward Upward’s life and works, Benjamin Kohlmann Playing up: Edward Upward in Cambridge and beyond, Charlotte Charteris In the 30s: Upward, literature and politics, Ben Clarke Modalities of 30s writing and writers: the case of Edward Upward Valentine Cunningham; ’Only degradation and slavery?’: the figure of the teacher in the writing of Edward Upward, Simon Grimble Radical eccentricity and postwar ordinariness, Nick Hubble ’History will not always be living here’: Edward Upward’s comic historiographies, Steven Matthews The post-war Kunstlerroman: Edward Upward and Henry Williamson taking themselves seriously, Mark Rawlinson Upward’s later stories, modernist intimacy and the Marxist unmentionable, Stuart Christie Edward Upward and the critique of everyday late life, Helen Small ’Walkers, not marchers’: the scope of walking in Upward’s late fiction, Rod Mengham Edward Upward’s remains, Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg Bibliography Index.

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.