| dc.description.abstract | This thesis, the first book length study of Allen Upward, challenges and replaces the predominant view of him as Ezra Pound’s case study of the neglected disappearing modernist genius. By including Upward’s popular fiction, poetry and journalism, dismissed by students of Modernism, I expose the importance of a disruptive figure, recognised by Pound but difficult to integrate into the case study of his modernist genius. Though some critics continued to view Upward as Pound’s case study, others registered this disruptive element which they regarded as integral to his originality as a thinker in his own right. While engaged on the research, I uncovered previously unknown primary evidence which further undermines the view that Upward’s significance resides in being Pound’s case study. I expose how his connection to philosophers such as Victoria Welby, theosophists such as G.R.S Mead and writers such as W.H. Auden, Edward Upward and Robert Duncan demonstrate his impact extends beyond Pound. I reveal how historians show that far from being an obscure figure he had been a well-known journalist, novelist, lawyer, and politician. This confusing range and diversity of his career and reputation confirm the existence of the unruly Allen Upward throughout his life and across his oeuvre. I argue not only is this disruptive figure present in his most philosophical works The New Word and The Divine Mystery but it also contributes to the former’s philosophy of language and the latter’s account of poetic genius. Allen Upward’s principal importance is not that he provided an occasional source of ideas for modernist aesthetics. It is in the narrative in which those ideas are embedded as a shape-shifting game-playing narrator who ensures no reader can get a detached, objective view. That is why everybody must fail to grasp him but also why he is a significant influence on modernism. | en_US |
