Selected Essays

by Orwell, George; Collini, Stefan

• ISBN13: 9780198804178
• ISBN10: 0198804172
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2021-03-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

George Orwell was one of the most celebrated essayists in the language, and there are quite a few of his essays which are probably better known than any of his other writings apart from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Stefan Collini presents a collection of Orwell's longer, major essays as well as a selection of shorter pieces, arranged into three categories: Personal/Descriptive, Literary, and Political.

Author Biography

George Orwell

Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature. After degrees at Cambridge and Yale, he taught at the University of Sussex before moving to a post in the Faculty in 1986. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, and other periodicals, and an occasional broadcaster.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of George Orwell
Selected Essays
Shooting an elephant (1936)
Inside the whale (1940)
Charles Dickens (1940)
Boys' weeklies (1940)
The art of Donald McGill (1941)
Wells, Hitler and the world state (1941)
Rudyard Kipling (1942)
Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944)
In defence of P.G. Wodehouse (1945)
Notes on nationalism (1945)
The prevention of literature (1946)
Decline of the English murder (1946)
Politics and the English language (1946)
Confessions of a book reviewer (1946)
Why I write (1946)
Politics vs literature: an examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946)
How the poor die (1946)
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
Writers and Leviathan (1948)
Explanatory Notes