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All Art Is Propaganda Paperback – October 14, 2009
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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.
- Print length374 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books Classics
- Publication dateOctober 14, 2009
- Reading age14 years and up
- Dimensions7.86 x 5.36 x 0.99 inches
- ISBN-100156033070
- ISBN-13978-0156033077
- Lexile measure1300L
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From the Back Cover
"Reaffirm[s] the author's status as one of the definitive essayists in English literature."--Los Angeles Times GEORGE ORWELL (1903?1950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.
GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.
KEITH GESSEN was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.Also in this series: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays
About the Author
George Orwell (1903–1950), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. He was born in India and educated at Eton. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living by writing. An author and journalist, Orwell was one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth-century literature. His unique political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with the dystopia of 1984 (1949), which brought him worldwide fame.
Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, The Nation, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books Classics; First Edition (October 14, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 374 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0156033070
- ISBN-13 : 978-0156033077
- Reading age : 14 years and up
- Lexile measure : 1300L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.86 x 5.36 x 0.99 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #187,216 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #91 in Literary Letters
- #237 in British & Irish Literature
- #567 in Essays (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.
At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.
It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.
Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.
George Orwell died in London in January 1950.
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Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens introduces this theme: “But every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message,’ whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.” (p. 47) That the Dickens message is not always clear is illustrated by the fact that people of many conflicting political leanings have, as Orwell puts it, “stolen” Dickens. Both Marxists and Catholics have latched onto him as a spokesman. This essay seeks to understand the real Dickens.
Some other literary heavyweights get a thorough Orwell examination in ths volume: Henry Miller, Shakespeare, Kipling, T.S. Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy is known to have rejected Shakespeare as not even “an average author.” Orwell finds the root of Tolstoy’s displeasure with the Bard to be “the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitudes toward life.” (p. 326) He sees in Tolstoy a writer whose religious orthodoxy makes it impossible to appreciate the sensuality and joy in living that we find in Shakespeare.
But Orwell’s critical eye is not only focused on the literary greats. “Boys’ Weeklies” takes a look at the amazing popularity of twopenny weeklies aimed a boys (sometimes called “penny dreadfuls”). These too, he finds, have a propagandistic motive. It is a motive more sinister than one might have suspected until you look into who owned and published these weeklies.
In “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” Orwell examines another popular genre: crime fiction. He decries their “vulgarisation of ideas,” “fearful intellectual sadism,” and “power-worship,” and he wonders what these trends say about British society.
Orwell does not limit himself to the art of writing. In “The Art of Donald McGill,” he examines the post card drawings of this popular artist. He looks at the obscenity of the post cards and wonders what it says about marriage and the stability of society. “Benefit of Clergy” is an analysis of the work of Salvador Dali. He sees in Dali’s work “a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency,” and concludes that “a society in which they [artists like Dali] can flourish has something wrong with it” (p. 215).
Walt Whitman, Charlie Chaplin, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gulliver’s Travels, the Catholic Church, Soviet Russia, Gandhi, H. G. Wells, Hitler, Voltaire, Graham Greene, India and British colonialism, fascism, communism, and democracy, and, of course, boys’ magazines and detective stories. Orwell’s range of topics is seemingly endless. He was a man who hated orthodoxy and cant, who thought deeply about the act of writing and how the written word affected people, and who then wrote about all these things clearly, simply, and powerfully.
The books that his legacy stands on for most readers are good, but in his essays we can see him explore the ideas that lead to the creation of both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm: Centennial Edition . In fact, both the essays "Politics and the English Language" and "The Prevention of Literature" could be easily attached as appendices to those books (both essays are in the present volume).
The only practical issue with this book is that many of the essays are more of the literary criticism approach or movie reviews (even if he would hate that characterization). If you do not have a familiarity with the source material that he is reviewing, you might seem out of sorts. In essays on both the careers of Dickens and Tolstoy I felt a disconnect because it taxed my limited familiarity with those authors.
The interesting thing about Orwell's writing is that the prerequisite knowledge is not really necessary. He uses the essay form to great strength, using what he is often ostensibly writing about as a launching point to talk about the world at large. In this sense, I kept thinking that on many levels his work is some of the first that could really be at home in a cultural studies department. I then realized that his writing voice precludes that. His work is and his voice is a plain, clear English that he advocated and is free of jargon. As smart as Orwell is, his writing feels like a conversation with an interesting and clever friend, which must be why I keep going back to his
The acerbic wit and ranging intelligence of Orwell is on full display in this pages. In addition, his rabid fear and hate of totalitarianism that has made him a touchstone for intellectuals both left and right is also apparent in his lucid analysis of Gulliver's travels and the supposed "utopia" of the Houyhnhnms. Some of these essays are familiar, such as Politics and the English Language but others are more obscure, such as Benefits of the Clergy: Some Notes on Salavdor Dali which was censored for obscenity in 1946. My particular favorite is Confessions of a Book Reviewer, which lacks the strong political overtones of his other essays but gives a vivid image into the overlooked aspect of Orwell's life as a workaday journalist and book reviewer.
Despite not living to see the Cold War or the rise of religious fanaticism his thoughts and words still matter. For those who are unfamiliar with Orwell outside 1984 or Animal Farm, All Art is Propaganda provides a great starting point into the writings of one of the great political writers of the modern era.
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Um ponto bem interessante é perceber a evolução política do escritor, saindo de um defensor ferrenho do comunismo, para um dos maiores críticos do regime soviético, o que me levou a entender o de onde surgiu outras obras como 1984 e Animal Farm.













