Talk:George Orwell

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Former featured article candidateGeorge Orwell is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates, please check the archive.
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DateProcessResult
September 24, 2009Featured article candidateNot promoted
On this day...A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on June 25, 2022.

graphic novel on orwell[edit]

My addition of the graphic novel on Orwell’s life (Such, Such Were the Joys) keeps getting taking off by a bamstick called HP Dudley - stop doing that please! It’s a book just as valid as the others noted there, and officially sanctioned by the Orwell estate and his son, Richard. Topknot2 (talk) 23:31, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Informer[edit]

Where's the bit that describes his informing on people to the secret shows? Keith-264 (talk) 10:31, 19 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Two entries formerly in article => potentially use to open a new Criticisms section?[edit]

Jews, antisemitism and zionism[edit]

His relationship to Jews has been a recurring topic in various publications. Texts with an obvious antisemitic slant, as well as texts with a determined rejection of antisemitism, from different periods of Orwell's career, and his comments about the increasing conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine under the British Mandate are quoted.

Under the headline "Orwell's evolving views on Jews", Raymond S. Solomon draws an arc from Orwell's first book Down and Out in Paris and London up to Nineteen Eighty-Four.[1] Anshel Pfeffer asks "Was Orwell an anti-Semite?" in the Israeli daily Haaretz.[2] Paul Seeliger, editor of the compilation of Orwell's texts On Jews and Antisemitism, describes his relationship to antisemitism and Jewish issues as "ambivalent".[3]

Writing in early 1945 a long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain", for the Contemporary Jewish Record, Orwell stated that antisemitism was on the increase in Britain and that it was "irrational and will not yield to arguments". He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others".[4] He wrote: "For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. ... Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness."[5] In Nineteen Eighty-Four, written shortly after the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against their enemy, Goldstein.

Sexuality

Sexual politics plays an important role in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, people's intimate relationships are strictly governed by the party's Junior Anti-Sex League, by opposing sexual relations and instead encouraging artificial insemination.[6] Personally, Orwell disliked what he thought as misguided middle-class revolutionary emancipatoryviews, expressing disdain for "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniacs".[7]

Orwell was also openly against homosexuality. Speaking at the 2003 George Orwell Centenary Conference, Daphne Patai said: "Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully."[8]

Orwell used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", for example, in expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left", and "nancy poets", i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden.[9] The protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock, conducts an internal critique of his customers when working in a bookshop, and there is an extended passage of several pages in which he concentrates on a homosexual male customer, and sneers at him for his "nancy" characteristics, including a lisp, which he identifies in detail, with some disgust.[10] Stephen Spender "thought Orwell's occasional homophobic outbursts were part of his rebellion against the public school".[11] Biohistorian15 (talk) 12:23, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  1. ^ "Orwell's evolving views on Jews". 18 October 2019.
  2. ^ "Was Orwell an anti-Semite?". Haaretz.
  3. ^ George Orwell, On Jews and Antisemitism, introduced, edited and annotated by Paul Seeliger (Berlin: Comino; 2022), ISBN 978-3-945831-32-8), p. 12
  4. ^ "Antisemitism in Britain", in As I Please: 1943–1945, pp. 332–341.
  5. ^ "Notes on Nationalism", 1945.
  6. ^ "We are the dead ... you are the dead". An examination of sexuality as a weapon of revolt in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Journal of Gender Studies. Retrieved 21 December 2018
  7. ^ "Nineteen Eighty-Four and the politics of dystopia" Archived 8 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine. British Library. Retrieved 21 December 2018
  8. ^ Rodden, John (2006). Every Intellectual's Big Brother: George Orwell's Literary Siblings. University of Texas Press, Austin. p. 162. ISBN 978-0292774537.
  9. ^ Sharp, Tony (2013). W H Auden in Context. Cambridge University Press. p. 95.
  10. ^ Orwell, George (1987). Keep The Aspidistra Flying. Secker & Warburg. ISBN 9780436350269.
  11. ^ Bowker, Gordon (2003). George Orwell. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0312238414.
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