The Revised Orwell

by Jonathan Rose (Editor)

Written to address recent discussions of George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, this impressive collection of interpretive writing debates the work's value as a portent for our future and questions much of the second-guessing that has taken place about how Orwell might have responded to events he did not live to see. Essays included in the work were prepared by scholars from a broad range of disciplines--intellectual historians, literary critics, experts on communication, psychologists, students of popular culture, sociologists, linguists, and classicists--to generate fresh new perspectives on Orwell and the Orwellian myth. Included among the essays is one of the first Soviet critiques of Nineteen Eighty-Four to appear in English translation; the piece was previously published in the Russian literary magazine Novy Mir in 1989. Several essays discuss the novel's literary artistry, its popular and modernist appeal, as well as the ways in which Orwell made use of psychoanalytic techniques. The Revised Orwell contains a lively selection of scholarly writing that reveals Orwell to be a controversial, politically idiosyncratic writer, but one well within the mainstream of British cultural history. These works are solidly researched and fully developed; they will make lasting contributions to Orwell studies.

263 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history and the history of the book. He served as the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and as the president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize and the British Council Prize. He is co-editor of Book History, which won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for the Best New Journal of 1999. He held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University and he reviews books for the The Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph.