George Orwell And The Radical Eccentrics

George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics celebrates the lives, literature, and politics of a group of four 'radical eccentrics' - the Tory anarchist poet Stevie Smith, the Marxist Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand, and the glamour-girl-turned-socialist Inez Holden - who formed a friendly circle around the famously radical and eccentric George Orwell. Demonstrating that Smith, Anand, and Holden matter for literary history just as they mattered for Orwell, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics gives name and shape to a neglected movement within interwar and wartime English writing. It focuses on the lives and texts of Smith, Anand, and Holden in order to argue that these three writers throw into question limiting assumptions about art and politics-about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire-in ways that their group's most influential radical, Orwell, cannot. Embarking upon a kind of biographical-political-cultural-literary criticism, this book brings the radical eccentrics' vital, potentially transformative conversation to the attention of scholars of English literature for the first time, suggesting fascinating new approaches to the study of literary London during the thirties and forties.

George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the most influential authors in the English language. His landmark novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have been translated into many foreign languages and inspired numerous stage and film adaptations. His well-known essays "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant" are widely anthologized and often taught in college composition classes. The writer is credited with inventing the terms "Big Brother," "thought crime," "unperson" and "double think." His name itself has become an adjective--"Orwellian." Seventy years after its publication, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains very popular, its sales surging in an era of enhanced surveillance and media manipulation. This literary companion provides an extensive chronology and more than 175 entries about both his literary works and personal life. Also included are discussion questions and research topics, notable quotations by Orwell and an extensive bibliography of related sources.

An intellectual who did not like intellectuals, a socialist who did not trust the state, a liberal who was against free markets, a Protestant who believed in religion but not in God, a fierce opponent of nationalism who defined Englishness for a generation. Aside from being one of the greatest political essayists in the English language and author of two of the most famous books in twentieth century literature, George Orwell was a man of profound contradictions. George Orwell:English Rebel takes us through the many twists and turns of Orwell's life and thought, from precocious, public school satirist at Eton and imperial policeman in Burma, through his early years as a rather dour documentary writer, and his formative experiences as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War. Robert Colls traces, in particular, Orwell's complex relationship with his country, from the alienated intellectual of the mid-1930s through a gradual reconciliation, to the exhilarating peaks of his wartime writing. He explores the mistakes and contradictions, the lucky escapes and near misses, and what they tell us about Orwell as man and author.

In a timely and radically new reappraisal of George Orwell's fiction, Loraine Saunders reads Orwell's novels as tales of successful emancipation rather than as chronicles of failure. Contending that Orwell's novels have been undervalued as works of art, she offers extensive textual analysis to reveal an author who is in far more control of his prose than has been appreciated. Persuasively demonstrating that Orwell's novels of the 1930s such as A Clergyman's Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying are no less important as literature than Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Saunders argues they have been victims of a critical tradition whose practitioners have misunderstood Orwell's narrative style, failed to appreciate Orwell's political stance, and were predisposed to find little merit in Orwell's novels. Saunders devotes significant attention to George Gissing's influence on Orwell, particularly with regard to his representations of women. She also examines Orwell's socialism in the context of the political climate of the 1930s, finding that Orwell, in his successful negotiation of the fine balance between art and propaganda, had much more in common with Charlie Chaplin than with writers like Stephen Spender or W. H. Auden. As a result of Saunders's detailed and accessible analysis, which illuminates how Orwell harmonized allegory with documentary, polyphonic voice with monophonic, and elegy with comedy, Orwell's contributions to the genre of political fiction are finally recognized.

Winifred Holtby, “A Woman In Her Time”: Critical Essays brings together for the first time a range of scholarly perspectives on one of Britain’s best-loved regional authors. Remembered for her vivid portrayal of 1930s rural Yorkshire in her final novel, South Riding (1936) and for her friendship with Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) has become a key figure for those interested in British literature, politics, and culture between the wars. Epitomising the professional independence and political passion which we have come to associate with the newly emancipated women of her era, Holtby’s was a life devoted to myriad causes and directed to the pressing issues of her day. With fresh perspectives on Holtby’s better known novels alongside new critical forays into her short stories, drama, journalism, and historical writing, Winifred Holtby, “A Woman In Her Time” sheds new light on a woman who not only spoke out in support of feminism, peace, and racial equality at a time when fascism and war loomed, but who also shared with us her views on a wide spectrum of topical concerns from Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, psychology, spinsters, mothers, and the B.B.C., to her delight in clothes, films, and village gossip.

This collection of original critical essays, newly available in paperback, launches an ambitious, long-term project marking out a new period and style in twentieth-century literary history.

The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. This series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies was founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme or issue; and relates aspects of Ford's work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. The present book is part of a large-scale reassessment of his roles in literary history. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade's End, which Anthony Burgess described as 'the finest novel about the First World War'; and Samuel Hynes has called 'the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman'. In these, as in most of his books, Ford renders and analyses the crucial transformations in modern society and culture. One of the most striking features of his career is his close involvement with so many of the major international literary groupings of his time. In the South-East of England at the fin-de-siècle, he collaborated for a decade with Joseph Conrad, and befriended Henry James and H. G. Wells. In Edwardian London he founded the English Review, publishing these writers alongside his new discoveries, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. After the war he moved to France, founding the transatlantic review in Paris, taking on Hemingway as a sub-editor, discovering another generation of Modernists such as Jean Rhys and Basil Bunting, and publishing them alongside Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Besides his role as contributor and enabler to various versions of Modernism, Ford was also one of its most entertaining chroniclers. This volume includes twelve new essays on Ford's engagement with the literary networks and cultural shifts of his era, by leading experts and younger scholars of Ford and Modernism. Two of the essays are by well-known creative writers: the novelist Colm Tóibín, and the novelist and cultural commentator Zinovy Zinik.

This bold new reading of Orwell's work focuses upon his representation of communities and the myths that shape them. It analyzes his interpretations of class, gender and nationality within the context of the period. The book uses a range of texts to argue that Orwell attempted to integrate 'traditional' communal identities with socialist politics.