All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays

George Orwell, Keith Gessen

HarperCollins, Oct 14, 2009 - Literary Collections - 416 pages

The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984.

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.

Contents

• Charles Dickens: 1
• Boys Weeklies: 63
• Inside the Whale: 95
• The Tempest The Peaceful Inn: 141
• The Great Dictator: 144
• Wells Hitler and the World State: 148
• The Art of Donald McGill: 156
• No Not One: 169
• Rudyard Kipling: 177
• T S Eliot: 194
• Can Socialists Be Happy?: 202
• Some Notes on Salvador Dali: 210
• Propaganda and Demotic Speech: 223
• Raffles and Miss Blandish: 232
• Good Bad Books: 248
• The Prevention of Literature: 253
• Politics and the English Language: 270
• Confessions of a Book Reviewer: 287
• An Examination of Gullivers Travels: 292
• Lear Tolstoy and the Fool: 316
• Writers and Leviathan: 337
• Review of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene: 346
• Reflections on Gandhi: 352
• Notes: 363

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
• Authors: George Orwell, Keith Gessen
• Contributor: Keith Gessen
• Publisher: HarperCollins, 2009
• ISBN: 0547417756, 9780547417752
• Length: 416 pages
• Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays; Literary Collections / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Collections / Letters