The 1940 Under the Volcano—hidden for too long in the shadows of Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece—differs from the latter in significant ways. It is a bridge between Lowry’s 1930s fiction (especially In Ballast to the White Sea) and the 1947 Under the Volcano itself. Joining the recently published Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, The 1940 Under the Volcano takes its rightful place as part of Lowry’s exciting 1930s/early-40s trilogy. Scholars have only recently begun to pay systematic attention to convergences and divergences between this earlier work and the 1947 version. Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen’s insightful introduction, together with extensive annotations by Chris Ackerley and David Large, reveal the depth and breadth of Lowry’s complex vision for his work. This critical edition fleshes out our sense of the enormous achievement by this twentieth-century modernist.
Published in English.

Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 in northwest England, near Liverpool. During the 1930s he lived in London, New York, Mexico, and Los Angeles before moving to British Columbia in 1939. This move marked the start of a startlingly fertile period in Lowry’s career as a 20th-century literary modernist. The 1940 Under the Volcano formed the basis for his masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947)—one of the last great modernist novels.

Malcolm Lowry's profile page

Miguel Mota is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In addition to his work on Lowry, Mota has published in the areas of contemporary British literature and culture and on the relationship between literature and film, including articles on Jeanette Winterson, John King, Mike Leigh, Derek Jarman, and Peter Greenaway, among others.

Miguel Mota's profile page

Paul Tiessen is the founding editor of the Malcolm Lowry Newsletter (1977–1984) and The Malcolm Lowry Review (1984–2002). Besides scholarly articles and chapters in books on the work of Malcolm Lowry, Tiessen wrote the Introduction for Malcolm Lowry and Margerie Bonner Lowry’s Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (Bruccoli Clark, 1976).

Paul Tiessen's profile page

Chris Ackerley's research area is modernism and his speciality is annotation, especially of the writings of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett. His first book (with Lawrence J. Clipper), A Companion to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (UBC Press, 1984), has become a standard reference.

Chris Ackerley's profile page

David Large is a research and teaching assistant at the University of Otago in New Zealand. With Chris Ackerley, he edits an annotation website dedicated to Under the Volcano.

David Large's profile page