Orwell today

Keeble, Richard (2012) Orwell today. Abramis, Bury St Edmunds. ISBN 9781845495534

Documents
OrwellToday_03.pdf
[img] PDF
OrwellToday_03.pdf - Whole Document
Restricted to Repository staff only

815kB
Item Type:Book or Monograph
Item Status:Live Archive

Abstract

George Orwell is today nothing less than a cultural icon. I typed Orwell
into the newspaper database LexisLibrary and over a three-month
period alone in the national newspapers he had been mentioned 153
times – and he’s been dead more than 60 years: Salman Rushdie could only
manage 130 mentions; Martin Amis 46; Angela Carter 39.
Significantly, Timothy Garton Ash in his ‘Introduction’ to Orwell and Politics
(2001: xi) describes Orwell as the most influential political writer of the
twentieth century. But Christopher Hitchens, who joined the Odd Squad after
his post 9/11 conversion to the gospel according to George Bush, was right
when he said:
George Orwell requires extricating from a pile of saccharine tablets and
moist hankies; since he’s become an object of sickly veneration and
sentimental over-praise, employed to stultify schoolchildren with his
insufferable rightness and purity (Hitchens 2002: 3).

Keywords:George Orwell, Journalism
Subjects:P Mass Communications and Documentation > P500 Journalism
Divisions:College of Arts > School of English & Journalism > School of English & Journalism (Journalism)
Relationships:
Relation typeTarget identifier
http://purl.org/dc/terms/hasParthttp://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/7799/
ID Code:6241
Deposited On:21 Sep 2012 15:02

Repository Staff Only: item control page