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As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low.
A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead.
All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary.
With masterpieces such as "Politics and the English Language" and "Rudyard Kipling" and gems such as "Good Bad Books," here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, "how to be interesting, line after line."
With an Introduction from Keith Gessen.
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
October 14, 2009 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780547417752
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780547417752
- File size: 669 KB
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- Lexile® Measure: 1300
- Text Difficulty: 10-12
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Reviews
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Starred review from August 25, 2008
Before he was a renowned novelist, George Orwell was a masterful essayist. Spanning the 1940s, this companion to Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays
showcases Orwell in an often unexpected cavalcade of observations on diverse subjects—in the literary field alone as varied as T. S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, Henry Miller, Graham Greene and Kipling. But since this is Orwell, the book takes on a range of subjects with gusto: power and bully worship and the deleterious influence of Catholicism on literature. Orwell’s withering observations on professional academic criticism (“Politics and the English Language”) are tempered by his sly “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” (“constantly inventing
reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever”) and “Good Bad Books” (the “supreme example” being Uncle Tom’s Cabin
). Not to be overlooked is a freewheeling take on the naughty postcards of Donald McGill. Overall, this collection highlights the work of a writer who always put his money where his mouth was, reiterating frequently the importance of clarity of expression in enabling independent thought.
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