The Road from George Orwell: His Achievement and Legacy

The Road from George Orwell: His Achievement

and Legacy

Alberto L?zaro Editor

PETER LANG

The Road from George Orwell: His Achievement and Legacy

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Alberto L?zaro (ed.)

The Road from George Orwell: His Achievement and Legacy

PETER LANG

Bern ? Berlin ? Bruxelles ? Frankfurt am Main ? New York ? Oxford ? Wien

Die Deutsche Bibliothek ? CIP-Einheitsaufnahme The road from George Orwell : his achievement and legacy / Alberto L?zaro (ed.). ? Bern ; Berlin ; Bruxelles ; Frankfurt am Main ; New York ; Oxford ; Wien : Lang, 2001 ISBN 3-906766-79-9 British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA

Cover design: Thomas Jaberg, Peter Lang AG

ISBN 3-906766-79-9 US-ISBN 0-8204-5337-4

? Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2001 Jupiterstr. 15, Postfach, 3000 Bern 15, Switzerland info@, All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

Contents

Preface............................................................................................. 7

Part I: Re-Evaluations

FERNANDO GALV?N The Road to Utopia, or On Orwell's Idealism........................... 15

CHRISTINE BERBERICH A Revolutionary in Love with the 1900s: Orwell in Defence of `Old England'........................................... 33

MIQUEL BERGA Orwell's Catalonia Revisited: Textual Strategies and the Eyewitness Account......................... 53

ALBERTO L?ZARO George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia: A Politically Incorrect Story ........................................................ 71

ANA MOYA George Orwell's Exploration of Discourses of Power in Burmese Days .............................................................................. 93

URMILA SESHAGIRI Misogyny and Anti-Imperialism in George Orwell's Burmese Days ................................................................................ 105

Part II: Orwell, History and Dystopia

ZO? FAIRBAIRNS 1984 Came and Went ................................................................. 123

BEATRIZ DOM?NGUEZ GARC?A The Retelling of History Through Her Story ........................... 139

ELIZABETH RUSSELL Looking Backwards and Forwards from Nineteen Eighty-Four: Women Writing Men's Worlds.............................. 157

SONIA VILLEGAS `History Is Not a Thing of the Past': The Theory and Practice of Historical Discourse in Alasdair Gray's A History Maker............................................ 179

JUAN FRANCISCO ELICES The Satiric and Dystopic Legacy of George Orwell in Robert Harris's Fatherland ...................................................... 199

BEN CLARKE Orwell and the Evolution of Utopian Writing ......................... 225

Preface

Following a tradition that goes back to 1987, the Department of English Philology at the University of Alcal?, Madrid, organised the VIIIth Conference on English Literature in May 2000. On this occasion, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of George Orwell's death, a wide range of papers on this significant and controversial literary figure were presented. The main purpose of the conference was to re-examine George Orwell's work and thought in the light of contemporary theoretical concerns, as well as to discuss the mark he has left in British literature in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly on political satire and the development of dystopian fiction.

Fifty years after his death, George Orwell is generally recognised as a leading exponent of twentieth-century English prose and one of the most influential satiric writers whose works have merited detailed scholarly attention. A wide range of editions of his novels, essays, journalism and autobiographical works are within the reach of the general reader, and his art has been discussed by numerous critics and literature specialists from many different approaches. There is no doubt that one of the reasons for the lasting appeal of his work lies in the qualities of its prose, as John Fowler suggests in The Language of George Orwell (1995), an excellent study of the writer's style. But it seems to me that Orwell is recognised more as a political writer than a master of style, although it cannot be denied that his writing is of excellent quality. Regarding his politics, Orwell seemingly managed to serve different Cold War political ideologies simultaneously, as Alex Zwerdling suggests in his analysis of the writer's left-wing ideas entitled Orwell and the Left (1974). Then, when the year 1984 came, critics celebrated Orwell and discussed his dystopian `predictions,' like Tom Winnifrith and William Whitehead in 1984 and All's Well?

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