The Unsung Artistry Of George Orwell

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.

An introductory guide to the life, work and legacy of George Orwell - one of the most influential literary twentieth-century figures.

Collection of forty essays written between 1968 and 2009.

A compilation of personal letters creates an autobiography of the author of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" through his correspondence with other literary luminaries, including T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller, as well as letters to complete strangers.

"George Orwell is sometimes read as being disinterested in if not outright hostile to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell said things of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of his corpus, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While he is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and to those philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality is the first monograph written by a philosopher that offers a reading of Orwell informed by historical and contemporary philosophy and promises to better our understanding of him and his work"--

This is the first book to focus primarily on George Orwell's ideas about free speech and related matters – freedom of the press, the writer's freedom of expression, honesty and truthfulness – and, in particular, the ways in which they are linked to his political vision of socialism. Orwell is today claimed by the Left and Right, by neo-conservatives and neo-socialists. How is that possible? Part of the answer, as Glenn Burgess reveals, is that Orwell was an odd sort of socialist. The development of Orwell's socialism was, from the start, conditioned by his individualist and liberal commitments. The hopes he attached to socialism were for a fairer, more equal world that would permit human freedom and individuality to flourish, completing, not destroying, the work of liberalism. Freedom of thought was a central part of this, and its defence and use were essential parts of the struggle to ensure that socialism developed in a liberal, humane form that did not follow the totalitarian path of Soviet communism. Written in celebration of Orwell's dictum, 'We hold that the most perverse human being is more interesting than the most orthodox gramophone record,' George Orwell's Perverse Humanity is a portrait of Orwell that captures these themes and provides a new understanding of him as a political thinker and activist. Based on archival research and new materials that affirm his work as an activist for freedom, it also uncovers a socialist ideology that has been obscured in just the way that the author feared it would be – associated in many people's minds with totalitarian unfreedom.

The remarkable transformation of Orwell from journeyman writer to towering icon Is George Orwell the most influential writer who ever lived? Yes, according to John Rodden’s provocative book about the transformation of a man into a myth. Rodden does not argue that Orwell was the most distinguished man of letters of the last century, nor even the leading novelist of his generation, let alone the greatest imaginative writer of English prose fiction. Yet his influence since his death at midcentury is incomparable. No other writer has aroused so much controversy or contributed so many incessantly quoted words and phrases to our cultural lexicon, from “Big Brother” and “doublethink” to “thoughtcrime” and “Newspeak.” Becoming George Orwell is a pathbreaking tour de force that charts the astonishing passage of a litterateur into a legend. Rodden presents the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in a new light, exploring how the man and writer Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, came to be overshadowed by the spectral figure associated with nightmare visions of our possible futures. Rodden opens with a discussion of the life and letters, chronicling Orwell’s eccentricities and emotional struggles, followed by an assessment of his chief literary achievements. The second half of the book examines the legend and legacy of Orwell, whom Rodden calls “England’s Prose Laureate,” looking at everything from cyberwarfare to “fake news.” The closing chapters address both Orwell’s enduring relevance to burning contemporary issues and the multiple ironies of his popular reputation, showing how he and his work have become confused with the very dreads and diseases that he fought against throughout his life.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four is aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates, and academics. Situating the novel in multiple frameworks, including contextual considerations and literary histories, the book asks new questions about the novel's significance in an age in which authoritarianism finds itself freshly empowered.