Journalism Beyond Orwell adapts and updates pioneering work by Richard Lance Keeble to explore George Orwell’s legacy as a journalist in original, critical – and often controversial – ways. Though best known as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell was, throughout his career, a journalist. The essays in this collection explore Orwell’s important legacy: as a practising activist journalist critical of the dominant media; as a polemicist, essayist and novelist constantly concerned with issues relating to war and peace; as a literary journalist determined to make ‘political writing an art’; and as a writer who warned of the growing powers of the secret state. Through this highly individualistic essay collection that connects Orwellian themes to modern journalism, Richard Lance Keeble explores key topics, including: Orwell the ‘proto-blogger’ How Orwell put his political economy critique of the corporate press into practice Information warfare in an age of hyper-militarism The manufacture of the myth of heroic warfare in the reporting of the Afghan conflict The debates over the theory and practice of peace journalism The ethical challenges for journalists reporting on conflict The crucial role of the alternative media The pleasures and pitfalls of the celebrity profile This collection will be of particular interest to students and researchers in journalism studies, English literature, media, intelligence studies and international relations.

With an international focus, and a broad historical scope, this student-friendly book focuses on the neglected journalism of writers more famous for their novels or plays, and explores the specific functions of journalism within the public sphere, and the literary qualities of journalism.

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.

Whether as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, an advocate of patriotic Socialism or a left-wing opponent of the Soviet Union, George Orwell was the ultimate outsider in politics - insecure, scornful of orthodoxies, cussedly independent. Best known today as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell also wrote seven other full-length books and and a vast number of essays, articles and reviews. A pioneering cultural critic, he addressed a range of important issues including art, literature, 'Englishness', mass communication and the spectre of totalitarianism. Famously describing his own background as 'lower-upper-middle class', Orwell had a complex relationship with Marxism and all his work reflects the influence of British communism. In this thoughtful and original study Philip Bounds argues that Orwell's writings effectively took the form of a dialogue with the leading British Marxists of his day. Bounds shows that Orwell often agreed with the Marxists and built on their insights in his writings, while on other occasions he used his disagreements with them as the basis of his own critical position. Through close analysis of Orwell's writings as well as his historical and literary context, Bounds has produced an important study of one of the iconic writers of the 20th century. 'Orwell and Marxism' offers a thorough introduction to Orwell the intellectual, reviving his reputation as a serious cultural thinker and documenting his most important influences, as well as a convincing portrait of British Marxism and society in the 1930s and 40s.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was George Orwell's final novel and was completed in difficult conditions shortly before his early death. It is one of the most influential and widely-read novels of the post-war period.

Journalism took a heavy toll on Orwell in the first months of 1946. Despite this unremitting pressure, he produced a major sequence of articles on "The Intellectual Revolt," and wrote one of his finest short essays, "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad." He wrote two radio plays for the BBC, and a pamphlet for the British Council, all of which are printed here for the first time. Orwell renewed contact with Yvonne Davet, he corresponded with Ihor Szewczenko, he tried to get Victor Serge's memoirs published in English, and he attempted to expose Soviet responsibility for the massacre of the Poles by arranging for a translation of Joseph Czapski'sSouvenirs de Starobielskto be published.

This bold new reading of Orwell's work focuses upon his representation of communities and the myths that shape them. It analyzes his interpretations of class, gender and nationality within the context of the period. The book uses a range of texts to argue that Orwell attempted to integrate 'traditional' communal identities with socialist politics.

"Chris Hedges's powerful memoir of his year of teaching inmates in a maximum-security New Jersey prison takes readers into the lives of men who were all but destined to become incarcerated because of their impoverished and dangerous childhoods and shows why criminal justice reform is so essential"--

Orwell’s "Politics and the English Language" in the Age of Pseudocracy visits the essay as if for the first time, clearing away lore about the essay and responding to the prose itself. It shows how many of Orwell’s rules and admonitions are far less useful than they are famed to be, but it also shows how some of them can be refurbished for our age, and how his major claim—that politics corrupts language, which then corrupts political discourse further, and so on indefinitely—can best be re-deployed today. "Politics and the English Language" has encouraged generations of writers and readers and teachers and students to take great care, to be skeptical and clear-sighted. The essay itself requires a fresh, clear, skeptical analysis so that it can, with reapplication, reclaim its status as a touchstone in our era of the rule of falsehood: the age of "pseudocracy."