Orwell and empire / Douglas Kerr.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2022]

1 online resource (224 pages) : illustrations (colour).

Access is available to the Yale community.

Description based on Publisher website; title from home page (viewed on May 24, 2022).

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

George Orwell was born in India, and served in the Imperial Police in Burma as a young man. Orwell and Empire is a study of his writing about the East, and the East in his writing. It argues that empire was central to his cultural identity, and that his experience of colonial life was a crucial factor, in ways that have not been recognized, in shaping the writer he became. Orwell and Empire is about all his writings, fictional and non-fictional. It pays particular attention to work that derives directly from his Burmese years, including the well-known narratives 'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' and his first novel, Burmese Days. It goes on to explore the theme of empire throughout his work, through to Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond, charting the way his evolving views on, for example, class, race, gender, and authority were shaped by his experience in the East and the Anglo-Indian attitudes he had inherited. Orwell's socialism and his hatred of authoritarianism, for example, grew out of his anti-imperialism, as The Road to Wigan Pier makes explicit. But this was not a straightforward repudiation, or a painless process. He understood that 'it is very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born'. His whole career was a creative quarrel with himself and with his Anglo-Indian patrimony. In a way that anticipates our current debates about the imperial legacy, he struggled to come to terms with his own history.

Oxford scholarship online.

Books / Online

English

November 07, 2022

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Electronic books.