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 The full range of Upward’s work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s his Marxist fiction of the 1930s the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy The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. |Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain
