News
March 2024
Michael Sheldon's recent PhD thesis, THE DISCARDED IMAGIST: The Life, Work and Reputation of Allen Upward, includes detailed discussion of Edward's relationship to this fascinating character, who was Edward's father's cousin.
June 2023
Letters and ephemera relating to the publication of Journey to the Border by the Hogarth Press can now be viewed online at the Modernist Archives Publishing Project.
March 2021
The ebook files of In the Thirties on this website have been updated to include a missing line in chapter one. The PDF versions were already correct.
December 2017
Nick Wagstaff has an article in Wormwood Number 29 Autumn 2017 entitled A Forgotten Radical Voice: Edward Upward. He introduces Upward's writing to readers of the journal which is devoted to 'the fantastic, supernatural and decadent in literature'.
March 2017
The Times Literary Supplement (March 24 2017) has as its leading article an interesting two-page review by Rod Mengham of Peter Stansky's Edward Upward: Art and Life. In addition, the 'From the Archives' section reprints a review of Upward's In the Thirties by Randall Swingler and a resulting exchange of letters with John Lehmann.
June 2016
A major biography, Edward Upward: Art and Life by Peter Stansky, has just been published by Enitharmon Press. The author has previously written numerous works about British history and culture, including books on George Orwell and William Morris.
June 2016
The ebooks of The Spiral Ascent available on this website have been updated to improve formatting (the text is unchanged). Versions in the azw3 format have also been added for users of more recent Kindle devices.
January 2015
Benjamin Kohlmann has contributed a chapter to The American Isherwood, edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman and published by University of Minnesota Press. ‘Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward’ presents and discusses two letters sent by Upward to Isherwood in 1939, in which Upward gives his reaction to Isherwood’s adoption of Vedanta.
September 2014
Ronald Paul has contributed an article to Cultural Logic 2011, which has just been made freely available on the web. ‘The Politics of the Personal in Edward Upward’s The Spiral Ascent’ includes long-overdue recognition of the importance of the character Elsie in the trilogy.
August 2014
Benjamin Kohlmann’s new book, Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s, published by OUP, contains a chapter entitled ‘Bad Dreams: Edward Upward and Marxist Prophecy’.
January 2014
Glyn Salton-Cox has written a major article entitled ‘Literary Praxis Beyond the Melodramas of Commitment: Edward Upward, Soviet Aesthetics, and Leftist Self-Fashioning’, published in Comparative Literature (2013) 65(4), pages 408–428.
September 2013
Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain has just been published by Ashgate. Edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, this collection contains the following contributions:
- 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 Künstlerroman: 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
August 2013
An article by Benjamin Kohlmann, ‘Edward Upward, W.H. Auden, and the Rhetorical Victories of Communism’, has been published in Modernism/modernity Volume 20, Number 2, April 2013.
January 2013
The latest update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography includes the new entry, ‘Upward, Edward Falaise (1903–2009), writer’, which has been written by Peter Parker.
December 2012
L’isola e il treno: L’opera di Edward Upward tra impegno politico e creatività artistica, by Mario Faraone, has been published by Sapienza University in Rome. This 637 page study, mainly written in Italian, includes an extensive bibliography and a long interview in English with Upward, conducted in 1998. It also contains a selection of photographs and a foreword in English by David Allinson. More details can be found on the publisher’s website.
July 2012
Ronald Paul has contributed an interesting article to the latest issue of Sartre Studies International. The abstract says that it ‘brings together the Sartrean concept of bad faith and Edward Upward’s novel, Journey to the Border’. The article is entitled ‘Sartrean Mauvaise foi in Edward Upward’s Journey to the Border’ and appears in Sartre Studies International Volume 18, Issue 1, Spring 2012 on pages 66–85.