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Orwell George
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume II: My Country Right or Left 1940-1943 by George Orwell Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF Back Cover: "He was a man, like Lawrence, whose personality shines out in everything he said or wrote." -- Cyril Connolly George Orwell requested in his will that no biography of him should be written. This collection of essays, reviews, articles, and letters which he wrote between the ages of seventeen and forty-six (when he died) is arranged in chronological order. The four volumes provide at once a wonderfully intimate impression of, and a "splendid monument" to, one of the most honest and individual writers of this century -- a man who forged a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud, who possessed an unerring gift for going straight to the point, and who elevated political writing to an art. The second volume principally covers the two years when George Orwell worked as a Talks Assistant (and later Producer) in the Indian section of the B.B.C. At the same time he was writing for Horizon, New Statesman and other periodicals. His war-time diaries are included here. Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia First published in England by Seeker & Warburg 1968 Published in Penguin Books 1970 Reprinted 1971 Copyright © Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1968 Made and printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks Set in Linotype Times This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Contents Acknowledgements A Note on the Editing 1940 1. -
Lights and Shadows in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia
Paul Preston Lights and shadows in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia Article (Accepted version) (Refereed) Original citation: Preston, Paul (2017) Lights and shadows in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Bulletin of Spanish Studies. ISSN 1475-3820 DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2018.1388550 © 2017 The Author This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85333/ Available in LSE Research Online: November 2017 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. Lights and Shadows in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia PAUL PRESTON London School of Economics Despite its misleading title, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is almost certainly the most sold and most read book about the Spanish Civil War. It is a vivid and well-written account of some fragments of the war by an acute witness. -
Orwell on Poland and Political Controversies of His Time
Orwell on Poland and Political Controversies of his Time Krystyna Wieszczek University of Southampton There could hardly be a more appropriate 20th-century British author to bring up for discussion under the theme of “conformity and controversy” than George Orwell. One of his well-known characteristics as an author and political commentator was that of striving to think independently and to boldly present his own conclusions to the public, irrespectively of how controversial they could be at the time. This paper will examine some of his texts that responded to specific issues concerning Poland during the turbulent period of Europe’s transition from war to post-war, in which his statements were not always compliant with those held by much of the British public or with the British censoring policy. It aims to discover more about how Orwell approached conformity and controversy surrounding some contentious problems of his time and, by doing so, also about their political contexts in both Britain and Poland. The texts taken into consideration include his responses to the Warsaw rising, the abduction and trial of sixteen Polish leaders by the Soviets, and the settlement of Polish refugees in Britain after the war. A Socialist’s Disappointment with the USSR Unappreciated at Home Orwell was one of few British left-wing intellectuals to question the government and left-wing press’s uncritical reception of Stalin’s politics in Britain well before the beginning of the cold war (the name of which he coined). His epiphany came during the Spanish civil war where he witnessed the insidious way in which a Soviet-sponsored communist organisation began eliminating fellow socialists, including members of the POUM1 in which Orwell had served, jeopardizing the whole socialist agenda only to gain more power. -
WHY ORWELL MATTERS Coordinator: John Becker George
WHY ORWELL MATTERS Coordinator: John Becker George Orwell was one of the most consequential writers of the 20th Century. As a novelist, journalist, literary critic and essayist, he exhibited an extraordinary range of interests. More effectively than any of his contemporaries, he posed questions about English society and politics that are still relevant, while also addressing the controversial history of the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. In this one-semester study group, we read the most famous works (Animal Farm, 1984) a 1930's novel (Keep The Aspidistra Flying), essays (some dealing with his role in the British colonial system), and excerpts from lesser-known works. Readings and other Required Materials: Animal Farm (Signet Classics, ISBN 978-0-451-52634-2, $9.99) 1984 (Signet Classics, ISBN 978-451-52493-5, $9.99) Keep The Aspidistra Flying (A Harvest Book - Harcourt, Inc., ISBN 978-0-15-646899-2, $14.95) Coursepack (under $10.00) John Becker has coordinated study groups in history (American Civil War, World War I), cinema (French and Italian, Film Noir) and literature (Marcel Proust, William Faulkner). * * * * * * * * Syllabus * * * * * * * * Week 1 Biography; Shooting An Elephant, A Hanging Week 2 Down and Out in Paris and London, England Your England Week 3 Keep The Aspidistra Flying - the story of a failed poet who must resolve the conflict between the dangers of a commercial civilization and the pull of family responsibilities and middle class values Week 4 Keep the Aspidistra Flying Week 5 Keep the Aspidistra Flying Week 6 Homage to Catalonia (excerpts), Inside the Whale Week 7 Animal Farm Week 8 1984 Week 9 1984 Week 10 1984 Week 11 1984 Week 12 1984 Week 13 Politics and the English Language, Such, Such Were The Joys.. -
George Orwell Why I Write
George Orwell Why I Write [d] From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books. I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i.e. seriously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ — a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's ‘Tiger, Tiger’. -
Narrative Viewpoint and the Representation of Power in George Orwell’S Nineteen Eighty-Four
Narrative viewpoint and the representation of power in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four BRIGID ROONEY This essay considers how ‘perspective’ and ‘choice of language’ in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, position the reader and contribute to the text’s representation of power, powerplay and people power.1 The aims of this essay can be restated in the form of two key questions. What specific features of the narrative in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four construct the text’s representation of power, and of powerplay? How do those features position the responder to think and feel about political power and about whether there can be people power? Questions of medium, textual form, and genre It is important to distinguish, at the outset, between ‘narrative’, as a general term for story or the telling of story, and ‘the novel’, as a particular medium or form of narrative. Narratives are everywhere in culture. Not only are they integral to novels but they also permeate films, news reports, and even the everyday stories we use to make sense of life. Narratives always position the listener, reader, or responder in particular ways, expressing partial truths, and creating or constructing certain views of reality while minimizing or excluding others. The novel, on the other hand, is a specific textual form that developed, in the medium of print, during the last three hundred years or so in European societies. Not all cultures and societies have given rise to ‘novels’, though all have told stories, in visual, oral, or written forms. The European novel’s popularity peaked in the nineteenth century. -
Down and out in Aragon: George Orwell's Near
Down and out in Aragon: George Orwell’s near-fatal wounding in the Spanish Civil War 8 /Winter 2020 Orwell in the Home Guard. UCL: © Orwell Archive, UCL Library Special Collections The Pharos Michael D. Shulman, MD, PhD Dr. Shulman (AΩA, The Perelman School of Medicine at the General Franco’s Falangists. He was assigned to a ragtag University of Pennsylvania, 1982) is a retired nephrologist. regiment made up of 80 poorly nourished soldiers and “several dogs.” 3 No bomb that ever burst Weeks passed during which Orwell’s regiment was hun- Shatters the crystal spirit kered down in the sticky clay of Aragon, exchanging occa- — George Orwell1 sional pot shots with the enemy. The mosquitos, as Orwell languidly notes, were “becoming a nuisance.” 3 The battle n a famous 1944 essay, George Orwell begins by re- losses took on an element of farce. The first five casualties marking on a German plane sketching vapor trails in in Orwell’s unit had been shot by their compatriots when the placid sky far above him, imagining the bombar- their weapons discharged accidentally. Soon ammunition Idier as a civilized fellow who bears no ill will.2 As Orwell grew scarce for both sides, and any vestigial political fervor knows, if the enemy is lucky, he will drop his bombs on was swallowed up by the unceasing misery and monotony the very place Orwell sits savoring his tea, but he cannot of trench warfare. be resented merely for that. The enemy is a functionary, Six months after his arrival in Spain, Orwell lay hid- and he arouses no emotion because he possesses no hu- den in a muddy trench awaiting the start of another day man features. -
A Study of Politics and Literature In
Murray Arnold Sperbfr • J -. I 'MARX: G. O.'S DOG': A STUDY OF POLITICS I AND LITERATURE IN GEORGE ORWELL'S I HOMAGE TO CATALONIA I That was about as far as my thoughts [about the Spanish Civil War} went. [ did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics-I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned nonsense to be over. Afterwards [ can see the significance of events, but while they are happening I merely want to be out of them-an ignoble trait, perhaps.1 After Orwetl returned from Spain, he struggled to write Homage to Catalonia. As he tells us in that work, the Barcelona police had raided his hotel room and seized his Spanish diary and notes. (From a literary point of view, this was probably fortunate: Homage has an organic quality that Orwell's previous work, The Road to Wigan Pier, lacks; the latter, mainly transcribed from notes, shows its patch.work composition.) Orwell spent the first six months back in England trying to write his Spanish experiences and at the same time study the historical background of the war. Being a part· time journalist and book reviewer, he was able to turn his study to profit and in so doing leave a complete record of his growing understanding of the Spanish Civil War. In An Age Like This we can follow Orwell's attempt to define his political position on the Spanish Civil War after he returned from Spain (Vol. -
The Humanism of George Orwell
THE HUMANISM OF GEORGE ORWELL APPROVED: ets^L Major Professor 3 (\ A svi JLGtCx, Minor(Professor irector of the DeparttffeprfT'oi History- Dean of the Graduate School />/A*' , Hale, Jeffrey Lee , The Humanism of George Orwell* Master of Arts (History), December, 1971, 107 pp., bibliography, 19 titles. This paper argues that George Orwell was a myth maker in the twentieth century, an age of existential perplexities. Orwell recognized that man is innately "patriotic," that the will-to-believe is part of his nature, but that the excesses of scientific analysis have disrupted the absolutes of belief. Through the Organic Metaphor, Orwell attempted to reconstruct man's faith into an aesthetic, and consequently moral, sensi- bility. Proposing to balance, and not replace, the Mechanistic Metaphor of industrial society, Orwell sought human progress along aesthetic lines, "Socialism" was his political expres- sion of the Organic Metaphor: both advocated universal integ- rity in time and space. The sources are all primary. All of Orwell's novels were used, in addition to three essay collections: Collected Essays; The Orwell Reader; and The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, editors, four volumes„ Orwell's essays and book reviews contain his best social criticisms. There are six chapters. The first chapter is the intro- duction, which includes a biographical sketch of Orwell, defi- nitions of the Organic and Mechanistic Metaphors, and a comment on the bibliography. The second chapter examines the oppression of the common man by monopolistic capitalism in colonial Burma and depression-ridden Europe, and Orwell's socialist advoca- tions. -
Byron, Orwell, Politics, and the English Language Peter Graham As I
Byron, Orwell, Politics, and the English Language Peter Graham As I began thinking about this lecture for the Kings College IBS it hit home that my first such presentation was 31 years ago, way back in 1982 at Groeningen. Some of the people who were there then are now gone (I think for instance of Elma Dangerfield, so formidable a presence in so small a package, and of Andrew Nicolson, who was celebrating his contract to edit Byron’s prose). Many others who were young and promising then are now three decades less young and more accomplished. Whatever: I hope you’ll bear with a certain amount of nostalgia in the ensuing talk—nostalgia and informality. The goal will be to make some comparative comments on two literary figures familiar to you all—and to consider several texts by these writers, texts that powerfully changed how I thought about things political and poetical when a much younger reader and thinker. The two writers: Eric Blair, better known to the reading public as George Orwell, and Lord Byron. The principal texts: Orwell’s essays, particularly “Politics and the English Language,” and and Byron’s poetico-political masterpiece Don Juan. Let’s start with the men, both of them iconic examples of a certain kind of liberal ruling-class Englishman, the rebel who flouts the strictures of his class, place, and time but does so in a characteristically ruling-class English way. Both men and writers display an upmarket version of the “generous anger” that Orwell attributes to Charles Dickens in a description that perfectly fits Byron and, with the change of one word, fits Orwell himself: “a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls” 2 Byron’s and Orwell’s iconically rebellious lives and iconoclastic writing careers bookend the glory days of the British Empire. -
The Censorship of George Orwell's Essays in Spain1
The Censorship of George Orwell's Essays in Spain1 ALBERTO LÁZARO (Universidad de Alcalá) While much of George Orwell's popularity rests on bis political fiction, particularly Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), his achievements as an essayist have also been widely celebrated. Apart from his books of extended reportage published in the 1930s - Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938) - Orwell's literary production of the 1940s inc1uded a very large number of reviews, artic1es and essays that appeared in a wide variety of periodical publications, such as the Observer, London Tribune, Manchester Evening News, The Listener, Partisan Review, Horizon, Left News and New Leader. Orwell only published two important collections of essays during bis lifetime, lnside the Whale (1940) and Critical Essays (1946), but irnmediately after bis death in 1950 several other volumes were produced, wbich gave English-speaking readers access to a wide variety of bis autobiographical, literary, political, sociological and cultural essays. In 1968 the four-volume Collected Essays, Joumalism and Letters oi George Orwell' edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, arrived as a brilliant c1imaxto Orwell's literary production, and gave further weight to the c1aimthat here indeed was a perceptive critic with a keen analytical eye and a persistent ability to tell unpleasant truths. During the Cold War period his essays were a much-quoted source in discussions of the threat of totalitarianism, imperialism in the East, the hypocrisy of intellectuals or the manipulation of the press during the Spanish Civil War. -
Elements of Satire and Irony in the Major Works of George Orwell
ELEMENTS OF SATIRE AND IRONY IN THE MAJOR WORKS OF GEORGE ORWELL ABSTRACT \ THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF JBottor of $I)iIo£(opt)p \ : IN ENGLISH V / BY JAWED S. AHMED DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH (INDIA) 2004 .-^•Tb NoT^43.i\?rf Chapter- I: Introduction This chapter explores the English writers' mindset especially during 1920's and 1930's and the background against which they were writing. In this chapter the history of satire has been explored right from the time of Persius, Horace and Juvenal - all considered to be classical masters of satire. Chaucer and Langland also find mention here as they too are renowned in this genre. The Age of Restoration in England was the age of political satire and both Dryden and Pope stand out as towering figures. Swift too holds a special position for his generalized satire. The sole objective of the satirists can rightly be said to correct the vices of society. George Orwell, too set out to highlight the discrepancies in the political system out of a sense of concern for diluting the power of evil in the world of politics. And at the end of the day, we find that he succeeds to a very great extent in expressing his socio-political views, and his commitment to bring about a radical change for the betterment of society. Chapter- II: Social and Political Baclcground In this chapter the causes of Orwell's all-round disillusionment are explored. His experiences are traced beginning with St. Cyprian's, then his bitter experiences as a police officer in Burma; after that his life in Paris and London and Spain.