Political and Cultural Perceptions of George Orwell

British and American Views

Ian Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781349952533
• eBook ISBN:
  9781349952540
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes George Orwell's politics and their reception across both sides of the Atlantic. It considers Orwell's place in the politics of his native Britain and his reception in the USA, where he has had some of his most fervent emulators, exegetists, and detractors. Written by an ex "teenage Maoist" from Liverpool, UK, who now lives and writes in New York, the book points out how often the different strands of opinion derive from "ancestral" ideological struggles within the Communist/Trotskyist movement in the 30's, and how these often overlook or indeed consciously ignore the indigenous British politics and sociology that did so much to influence Orwell's political and literary development. It examines in the modern era what Orwell did in his–the seductions of simplistic and absolutist ideologies for some intellectuals, especially in their reactions to Orwell himself.

Table of contents

• Political and Cultural Perceptions of George Orwell
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Orwell: Good or Ungood?
• Part I Choking with Rage: Doublethink and Criticism
• Chapter 2 In Defense of Comrade Psmith: The Orwellian Treatment of Orwell
• Chapter 3 The Orwellian Method
• Chapter 4 Orwell the Socialist
• Chapter 5 Tangential Criticisms
• Part II In Memoriam—Retrospective Views
• Chapter 6 Orwell’s Own Airstrip One in 2014
• Chapter 7 The Persistence of Pessimism, Oceania 20 Years After Nineteen Eighteen-Four
• Chapter 8 Afterlife of an Atheist
• Part III Beyond the Telescreen—Snitching, Snooping and Surveillance
• Chapter 9 No Bother About Big Brother
• Chapter 10 Alexander Cockburn and “Snitching”
• Chapter 11 The List
• Part IV What Is Left?
• Chapter 12 Disabusing Idiocy? Orwell and the Left
• Chapter 13 And Orwell and the Democratic Left
• Chapter 14 Striking Back at the Empire
• Part V Interlude
• Chapter 15 Revolution Is No Tea Party but It’s Easier in a Salon: Reading the Leaves Afterwards
• Chapter 16 Orwell and the Left in the United States—The Under-Reported Side of Oceania!
• Chapter 17 Letters to Oceania?
• Chapter 18 Irving Howe, Orwell’s Prophet in the USA
• Part VI Cover Bards—Hitchens the Orwell Emulator and His Detractors
• Chapter 19 Orwell’s Lives
• Chapter 20 Why Hitchens Matters
• Chapter 21 Christopher Hitchens and Orwell
• Chapter 22 Antithesis Incarnate: Christopher Hitchens, a Retrospective Glance
• Chapter 23 Hitchens and the Iraq War
• Chapter 24 Truth in Journalism
• Selected Bibliography
• Index