Download or read book The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell written by Loraine Saunders and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell written by John Rodden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introductory guide to the life, work and legacy of George Orwell - one of the most influential literary twentieth-century figures.
Download or read book Orwell written by Jeffrey Meyers and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of forty essays written between 1968 and 2009.
Download or read book George Orwell A Life in Letters written by George Orwell and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Appearing for the first time in one volume, these trenchant letters tell the eloquent narrative of Orwell’s life in his own words. From his school days to his tragic early death, George Orwell, who never wrote an autobiography, chronicled the dramatic events of his turbulent life in a profusion of powerful letters. Indeed, one of the twentieth century’s most revered icons was a lively, prolific correspondent who developed in rich, nuanced dispatches the ideas that would influence generations of writers and intellectuals. This historic work—never before published in America and featuring many previously unseen letters—presents an account of Orwell’s interior life as personal and absorbing as readers may ever see. Over the course of a lifetime, Orwell corresponded with hundreds of people, including many distinguished political and artistic figures. Witty, personal, and profound, the letters tell the story of Orwell’s passionate first love that ended in devastation and explains how young Eric Arthur Blair chose the pseudonym "George Orwell." In missives to luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly, and Henry Miller, he spells out his literary and philosophical beliefs. Readers will encounter Orwell’s thoughts on matters both quotidian (poltergeists and the art of playing croquet) and historical—including his illuminating descriptions of war-shattered Barcelona and pronouncements on bayonets and the immanent cruelty of chaining German prisoners. The letters also reveal the origins of his famous novels. To a fan he wrote, "I think, and have thought ever since the war began…that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism." A paragraph before, he explained that the British intelligentsia in 1944 were "perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history," prefiguring the themes of 1984. Entrusting the manuscript of Animal Farm to Leonard Moore, his literary agent, Orwell describes it as "a sort of fairy story, really a fable with political meaning…This book is murder from the Communist point of view." Hardly known outside a small circle of Orwell scholars, these rare letters include Orwell’s message to Dwight Macdonald of 5 December 1946 explaining Animal Farm; his correspondence with his first translator, R. N. Raimbault (with English translations of the French originals); and the moving encomium written about Orwell by his BBC head of department after his service there. The volume concludes with a fearless account of the painful illness that took Orwell’s life at age forty-seven. His last letter concerns his son and his estate and closes with the words, "Beyond that I can’t make plans at present." Meticulously edited and fully annotated by Peter Davison, the world’s preeminent Orwell scholar, the volume presents Orwell “in all his varieties” and his relationships with those most close to him, especially his first wife, Eileen. Combined with rare photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, George Orwell: A Life in Letters offers "everything a reader new to Orwell needs to know…and a great deal that diehard fans will be enchanted to have" (New Statesmen).
Download or read book George Orwell written by Peter Brian Barry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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"--
Download or read book George Orwell s Perverse Humanity written by Glenn Burgess and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Becoming George Orwell written by John Rodden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty Four written by Nathan Waddell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) remains a book of the moment. This Companion builds on successive waves of generational inheritance and debate in the novel's reception by asking new questions about how and why Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, what it means, and why it matters. Chapters on a selection of the novel's interpretative contexts, the literary histories from which it is inseparable, the urgent questions it raises, and the impact it has had on other kinds of media, ranging from radio to video games, open up the conversation in an expansive way. Established concerns (e.g. Orwell's attitude to the working class, his anxieties about the socio-political compartmentalization of the post-war world) are presented alongside newer ones (e.g. his views on evil, and the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on comics). Individual essays help us see in new ways how Orwell's most famous work continues to be a novel for our times.
Download or read book Burmese Days written by George Orwell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on his experiences as a policeman in Burma, George Orwell's first novel is set during the end days of British colonialism, when Burma is ruled from Delhi as part of British India.
Download or read book Orwell written by Richard Bradford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most enduringly popular and controversial writers of the twentieth century, George Orwell's work is as relevant today as it was in his own lifetime. Possibly, in the age of Brexit, Trump, and populism, even more so. 'Doublethink' features in Nineteen Eighty-Four and it is the forerunner to 'Fake News'. He foresaw the creation of the EU and more significantly he predicted that post-Imperial xenophobia would cause Britain to leave it. His struggle with his own antisemitism could serve as a lesson to today's Labour Party and while the Soviet Union is gone, China has taken its place as a totalitarian superpower. Aside from his importance as a political theorist and novelist, Orwell's life is fascinating in its own right. Caught between uncertainty and his family's upper middle-class complacency, Orwell grew to despise the class system that spawned him despite finding himself unable to fully detach himself from it. His life thereafter mirrored the history of his country; like many from his background he devoted himself to socialism as a salve to his conscience. In truth he reserved as much suspicion and distaste for the 'proles' as he did pity. He died at the point when Britain's status as an Imperial and world power had waned but his work remains both prescient and significant. Orwell: A Man of Our Time offers a vivid portrait of the man behind the writings, and places him and his work at the centre of the current political landscape.
Download or read book Keep the Aspidistra Flying written by George Orwell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success." Disgusted by society's materialism, Gordon Comstock leaves his job in advertising to pursue an ill-fated career as a poet. In his race to the bottom, only Rosemary, his long-suffering girlfriend, challenges Gordon's self-destructive course. The novel contains the most sustained reflections on the role of the author and the artistic imagination anywhere in Orwell's fiction, as the book's protagonist struggles (and ultimately fails) to reconcile his romantic-aestheticist sensibilities with the pressures of the literary marketplace and with social expectations. Completed while Orwell travelled north to work on The Road to Wigan Pier, this novel is a key transitional text in his career. Offering a powerful portrayal of the emotional toll of precarity and the desire to break with capitalism, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a significant work of mid-century British fiction but it also speaks to our own time. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Download or read book Joycean Legacies written by Martha C. Carpentier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The 1940s A Decade of Modern British Fiction written by Philip Tew and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did social, cultural and political events concerning Britain during the 1940s reshape modern British fiction? During the Second World War and in its aftermath, British literature experienced and recorded drastic and decisive changes to old certainties. Moving from potential invasion and defeat to victory, the creation of the welfare state and a new Cold war threat, the pace of historical change seemed too rapid and monumental for writers to match. Consequently the 1940s were often side-lined in literary accounts as a dividing line between periods and styles. Drawing on more recent scholarship and research, this volume surveys and analyses this period's fascinating diversity, from novels of the Blitz and the Navy to the rise of important new voices with its contributors exploring the work of influential women, Commonwealth, exiled, genre, avant-garde and queer writers. A major critical re-evaluation of the intriguing decade, this book offers substantial chapters on Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and George Orwell as well as covering such writers as Jocelyn Brooke, Monica Dickens, James Hadley Chase, Patrick Hamilton, Gerald Kersh, Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Renault, Denton Welch and many others.
Download or read book George Orwell Collection written by George Orwell and published by E-Kitap Projesi & Cheapest Books. This book was released on 2024-01-18 with total page 2099 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Excellent Collection brings together Orwell's longer, major books and a fine selection of shorter pieces. With great originality and wit Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defence of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell's Books created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move and entertain. This Books created and collected in George Orwell's Most important Works illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of the XX century - a man who elevated political writing to an art. This Collection included: · 1984 · ANIMAL FARM · A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER · BURMESE DAYS · COMING UP FOR AIR · DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON · HOMAGE TO CATALONIA · KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING · LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR · THE LION AND THE UNICORN · THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER
Download or read book All Art Is Propaganda written by George Orwell and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-17 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary."how to be interesting, line after line."
Download or read book All Art Is Propaganda written by George Orwell and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering commentary on the worlds of film, drama, literature, and language, a collection of criticism and essays by the author of 1984 includes such pieces as "Politics and the English Language," "Rudyard Kipling," and "Good Bad Books."
Download or read book George Orwell written by Mark Connelly and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
