The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell offers a wide-ranging reconsideration of Orwell's life and work, focusing on the extensive connections between his novels, essays, diaries, columns, letters, and reviews. Accessible to general audiences and to established scholars alike, forty-eight chapters written by an international team of Orwell specialists address familiar topics—such as Orwell's journalism, broadcasting, literary criticism, and politics—as well as less well-trodden areas of his output, such as his accounts of stupidity, kindness, and justice, and his connections with contemporaries like Jack Common, Katharine Burdekin, Wyndham Lewis, and Victor Serge. Sections on Orwell's professional activities, his main literary influences, his politics, his intellectual fixations, his literary contemporaries, and his legacies structure the book, which moves thematically and topically through the full scope of his output.