This book is a study of the relationship between politics and literary writing in British culture during the 1930s and subsequent decades. It takes as its main case study the work of Edward Upward, a writer whose commitment to Marxism-Leninism in the 1930s forced him to examine the political dimensions of literary form. From the early 1930s to the early 1940s, Upward subjected his work to a discipline that seemed at times alien to his beginnings as an energetic avant-gardist, devoted to varieties of textual extravagance. His self-imposed pressure to conform is partly what drove him into silence during the period from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, after which he returned to publishing with the first volume of the trilogy, The Spiral Ascent, a remarkable project in which the development of a Marxist understanding of history is related intimately to the evolution of an individual sensibility. Upward's trajectory represents a journey from one extreme to another, in terms of the range of options available to literary experimentalists during the middle years of the twentieth century.
This account of his development is the first book-length study to give his work the significance it deserves. At the same time, although it keeps on returning to Upward's work as the central example, the discussion does not focus exclusively on a single figure, but pays a generous amount of attention to other practitioners. Upward stands out, but he does so as member of a cultural milieu in which other novelists and poets pursued alternative methods of incorporating political concerns into their writing practices. Chief among these are Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, George Barker, William Sansom, Elizabeth Bowen, James Hanley and Wyndham Lewis.
- ISBN10 0198122438
- ISBN13 9780198122432
- Publish Date 1 December 2003
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 1 March 2007
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Oxford University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 240
- Language English