“A Boot Stamping on a Human Face – For Ever”: George Orwell, Language, Literature, and Politics
“A Boot Stamping on a Human Face – For Ever”: George Orwell, Language, Literature, and Politics

Summary/Abstract: Britain experienced the harshness of 20th-century dictatorship and censorship only obliquely, as a reflection of what was happening in several “elsewheres”. Yet, events such as the Spanish Civil War deeply affected a whole generation of young British writers who, after the period of elitist Modernism, were trying to reassert the political import of literature through a redefinition of the role of the artist as politically and socially engagé. George Orwell figures as one of the most disenchanted and lucid witnesses of this particular historical moment. In both his essays and journalistic articles, as well as in his narrative work, he continuously ponders over the relationship between political power and society on the one hand, and language and literature on the other, providing a most interesting analysis of the mechanisms that preside over this interaction.

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