Orwell\u27s 1984 and the Lonely World of Campaign Management

George Geib\u27s essay discussing the relevance and humanistic appeal of George Orwell\u27s 1984 in the advent of the 1984 political election

Peter Stansky, historian and writer, in conversation: George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War.

Peter Stansky is an eminent Emeritus Professor of History, specialising in Modern British History, who has been at Stanford University since 1968. I sought him out for his expertise on Orwell while researching at the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University in April 2013. I was aware that Stansky had written two books on Orwell, in collaboration with William Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell in 1972 and Orwell: The Transformation in 1979. This conversation focuses on Orwell and his role in Spain and deals with some of the issues faced by Stansky and Abrahams in writing their Orwell books. The conversation also includes references to three historians who are pivotal in my thesis - Paul Preston, Burnett Bolloten and George Esenwein

[Review of] Gerald Vizenor. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade

It was George Orwell who saw, more clearly than most, that “newspeak” was often used by government and public institutions in communicating with their public. He warned that such jargon would separate government from the governed

1984: THE MASTERPIECE THAT KILLED GEORGE ORWELL (CHAPTER I)

The novel 1984, the final masterpiece of George Orwell, was published in 1949 which is a dystopian social science fiction novel. Thematically, the core idea of his masterpiece is about the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell inspired writing his last novel on dystopian novel “We”, the production of Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, which was introduced him by literature professor Gleb Struve in 1944. However, later in 1946, George Orwell wrote about dystopian novel “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley in his article "Freedom and Happiness" for the Tribune. In his article he mentioned about similarities to “We”. By this time the political satire “Animal Farm” which Orwell published in 1945, had scored a critical and commercial hit and also raised his profile. So then, Orwell decided to write his novel “1984”

The Banality of Virtue: A Multifaceted View of George Orwell as Champion of the Common Man

This dissertation focuses on several aspects of the life and works of one Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell. It views Orwell as a servant of empire, as a revolutionary, as an intellectual, as an optimistic skeptic, as a writer, as a sort of prophet, and as a critic. It makes the case that Orwell wrote with the interests of the common people at the forefront of his mind, and that the threats to humanity and the liberal Western tradition existing in the 1930s and 1940s still exist today, albeit in a form that would have surprised Orwell himself. The passing of the year 1984 prompted a sigh of relief in Western societies who celebrated Big Brother's failure to arise in that celebrated year. As we end the first decade of the twenty-first century, we should consider whether or not we truly have avoided the perils of totalitarianism and the possible nightmare world that Orwell envisioned. This work engages Orwell's past, his present, and his unseen future: our own present. It applies Orwell to the postmodern world in an effort to emphasize that his work still matters

‘In Spain with Orwell’: George Orwell and the Independent Labour Party volunteers in the Spanish Civil War

Book review: Christopher Hall, "‘In Spain with Orwell’: George Orwell and the Independent Labour Party volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, Tippermuir Books, Perth, Scotland, 2013, pp. 265 + i-xii

George Orwell: The English dissident as Tory anarchist

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 The Author.This article examines the nature of George Orwell's Tory anarchism, a term that he used to describe himself until his experiences in Spain in 1936. The argument developed here says that the qualities that Orwell felt made him a Tory anarchist remained with him throughout his life, even after his commitment to democratic socialism. In fact, many of those qualities (fear of an all-powerful state, respect for privacy, support for common sense and decency, patriotism) connect the two aspects of his character. The article explains what the idea of a Tory anarchist means, describing it as a practice rather than a coherent political ideology, and moves on to examine the relationship between Eric Blair, the Tory anarchist, and George Orwell, the democratic socialist. It makes the case for his Tory anarchism by drawing out recurring themes in his work that connect him to other Tory anarchist figures such as his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Thus Tory anarchism is presented as a conservative moral critique of the modern world that can connect figures who hold quite radically different political beliefs

George Orwell and Raymond Williams : a comparison of their thoughts on politics, letters and language

Bibliography: pages 221-230.The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between George Orwell and Raymond Williams as reflected in their respective writings on politics, letters and language. The study aims to provide a close historical reading of exemplary texts written by Orwell and Williams. This involves: description of the historical context in which the texts were produced; close analysis of the selected texts; and summarising their related writings in these three areas in order to place the 'exemplary texts' in the context of their work as a whole. Finally, having thus provided a synthesis of their respective thoughts on politics, letters and language, the similarities and differences between Orwell and Williams are derived. The conclusion drawn in this study is that notwithstanding several important differences, Orwell and Williams share a number of fundamental assumptions and beliefs in these defined areas. In their 'political' writings, they share a reliance on the evidence of experience; a sense of Britain as a society governed ultimately by consensus rather than by conflict; and a commitment to similar forms of socialist-humanism. In their work on letters, they both resist the dominant definitions of 'literature'; they both explore the relation between 'politics' and 'letters'; and they both seek to use 'letters' in the service of (socialist) 'politics'. In their understandings of language, both Orwell and Williams assume a 'unified subject' that precedes language as the source of meaning; they both insist on the existence of some pre-linguistic 'reality'; and they share a sense of language as being in some way constitutive. The differences between Orwell and Williams can be summarised as follows: first, they wrote in different contexts; second, they represent different constituences of British socialism (Orwell middle-class and Williams working-class}; and third, whereas Orwell is a popular essayist, Williams is a literary academic, who explores the many concerns they share with greater subtlety and care