­^°ê¤å¾Ç­º­¶   /   The 20th Century -- First Half ¤G¤Q¥@¬ö -- «e¥b  /  §@®a  /  George  Orwell  ³ìªv¡D¼Ú«Âº¸
George  Orwell
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¥D­n¤åÃþ¡GNovel
¸ê®Æ´£¨ÑªÌ¡GBeatrice Hsu/®}¼z­ë;Kate Liu/¼B¬ö¶²;Kevin Yao/«À³Í¤¸
ÃöÁä¦rµü¡G20th Cntury British novelist and essayist

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1903-1950

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¡@      ³ìªv¡D¼Ú«Âº¸¥»¦W¦ã·ç§J¡D¨È·æ¡D¥¬µÜº¸(Eric Arthur Blair)¡A ©ó1903¦~6¤ë23¤é¥Í©ó¦L«×ªB©s¥[©Ô¬Ù ªº²ö´£«¢§Q(Motihari, Bengal, India)¡A¬°®a¤¤¦Ñ¤G¡A¤W¦³¤@©j¦W¬°°¨¹Å¦C(Marjorie)¡A¤@ ©f¦W¬°·R¦ò·ç¨à(Avril)¡C¤÷¿Ë§õ¹î¡D¥¬µÜº¸(Richard Walmesley Blair)¬° ¤@Ĭ®æÄõ¸Çªº­^°ê¤H¡A´¿¥ô¦L«×Á`·þ©²¾~¤ù§½°Æ¥N²z¤H¡A¦Ó¥À¿Ë¦ã¹F¡D±ö°ö¨à¡D§õ²ö®á(Ida Mabel Limouzin Blair)ªºªkÂǤ÷¿Ë«h¦b½q¨l±q¨Æ¤ì§÷·~¡A¦Ó¥À¿Ë«h¬°­^°ê¤H¡C¨â¤H©ó1896¦~©ó¦L«×µ²±B¡C1904¦~¡A¦ã¹F¬°¤F¤p«Ä ¤lªº±Ð¨|°ÝÃD¡A«K±a¥L­Ì¦^¨ì­^°ê¡C

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¡@    1947¦~¡A ¼Ú«Âº¸¥Xª©¤F¼vÅT²`»·ªº´²¤å¡q¬Fªv»P­^»y¡r("Politics and the English Language")¡A®Ñ¤¤ªí¹F¥L¹ï»y¨¥ªº±ÑÃa·P¨ì¼~¤ß¥^¥^¡C¤j¶q¨Ï¥Î°ûÂà»y¡A¼Ò½k¨Ã¨Ï¯u¥¿ ·N¸q§ó¥[»£Àß¡A´«¥y¸Ü»¡¡A»y¨¥¦¨¬°·¥Åv²Îªv¾Þ§Ëªº¤u¨ã¡CÀHµÛ³o½g­«­n¤å³¹ªºµoªí¡A¼Ú«Âº¸¤]¥¿¦bÁßÆC¥L³Ì¬°Ázª¥¤H¤fªº¬Fªv¿Ø¨ë¹w¨¥¤p»¡¡C1947¦~¡A¼Ú«Âº¸Äâ¾i¤l §õ¹î(Richard)«e ©¹Ä¬®æÄõ¦è®ü©¤¥~ªº¦¶©Ô®q (the Scottish island of Jura) ªºÃe§Æº¸¹A²ø¡A¨Ã¦b¨º¸Ì±M¤ß¼g¦¨¡m1984¡n(Nineteen Eighty-Four)¡A¦ý¦¹®É¥Lªº°·±d¤w¤éº¥´c¤Æ¡C¤p»¡©ó1949¦~¥Xª©¡A¼Ú«Âº¸¦] ¦¹¸ó¤J­^°ê¤å¾Ç¥v¤W¤@¬yªº¤p»¡®a¤§¦C¡C®Ñ¤¤³±·t¡B¨H­«ªº®ðª^¥¿¥YÅã¥X¦b·¥Åv²Îªv¤U¤H©Êªº§á¦±»P»y¨¥ªº¯}Ãa¡A¥¿¦p®Ñ¤¤¤@¥y¼Ð»y©ÒÅã¥Üªº¡G¡u¾Ôª§§Y©M¥­ / ¦Û¥Ñ§Y¥£§Ð / µLª¾§Y¤O¶q¡v¡C¤p»¡¥Xª©ªº¦P¦~¡A¼Ú«Âº¸»P¡m¦a¥­½u¡nÂø»xªº½s¿è¯Á©g¨È¡D¥¬³Ò­@º¸µ²±B¡C¹j¦~¡A1950¦~1¤ë23¤é¦]ªÍµ²®Ö¯f³u©ó­Û ´°¡A¨É¦~47·³¡C

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¡@ ¡@

Orwell, 20th Century English Novelist and Essayist, Biograpgical Outline

1

George Orwell

1874-1963

¡@
 His Family and Education

     A. His family

     B. Early development of Orwell's literary interest

     C. Education

 Experience in Burma as a Policeman

 Beginning of the Career as a Writer

 Socialist Writer: the 1930's

 World War II 

 His later life

 Orwell as an Essayist

¡@
George Orwell, famous for his two political satires, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, is one of the greatest novelists and essayists in the world. His energetic prose style helps raise political-literary journalism to an art. His writing is like a splash of cold water in the face. For him, writing a good prose should be "as clear as a windowpane," which also describes his intellectual integrity. Calling himself "lower-upper-middle class," Orwell wrote to fight against any form of totalitarianism all his life, and was thus seen by his contemporaries as the conscience of his age.

¡@

 His Family and Education
¡@ A. His family
  1. "George Orwell" was the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, who was born in Motihar, Bengal, India in 1903 as the second son of Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida Mabel Limouzin Blair. He had one elder sister named Marjorie and the younger sister named Avril.
  2. His father worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Government. His mother had lived in Burma with her French teak merchant father. They married in 1896.
  3. In 1904, his mother brought him back to England for education.

B. Early development of Orwell's literary interest

  1. As the middle child of his family, Orwell felt lonely since moving back to England, and developed the habit of making up stories and imaginary persons to talk to. As he himself described of the time that influenced his whole life,
    I soon developed disagreeable mannerism, which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. [¡K] I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feelings of being isolated and undervalued. ("Why I Write?" 1946)
  2. His childhood reading was Thackeray, Kipling, and H. G. Wells.
  3. Jack London's The People of Abyss (1903) inspired him to concentrate on the life of
    the lower class people of England.

C. Education

  1. At the age of 5, he went to a small Anglican convent school in Henley.
  2. At the age of 8, he went to St. Cyprians prep school in Eastbourne, which he described as "a lukewarm bath of snobbery." This was also the place that Orwell felt the horror of totalitarianism for the first time. His bitter essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," published posthumously in 1953, dealt with this period.
  3. At the age of 14 in 1917, Orwell's good academic performances won him both a scholarship and admission to Eton, the most famous school for those wealthy and upper-class students in England.
  4. The unhappy memory in St. Cyprians prep school happened again in Eton, which made Orwell uneasy and perplexed. However, this negative part of his education did not frustrate Orwell. He learned lots of classics, and wrote poetry, drama and novels.
  5. Although the schooldays at Eton were not happy ones for Orwell, its free and open learning environment became an abundant soil for Orwell to develop an independent mind which was equipped with basic abilities to explore the world.

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 Experience in Burma as a Policeman
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After graduating from Eton, he didn't choose to enter Cambridge or Oxford University, but joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to1927. This period of time became a turning point for him. The social injustice he hated most since his schooldays got embodied then as power control of the colonizer over the colonized.
  1. This firsthand experience partly lead to his life-long concern for politics, social affair, and any form of totalitarianism, as well as his expression of anti-imperialism in his later essays and books.
  2. Psychologically, the brutal appearance of power relations of imperialism also induced a sense of guilt in Orwell. He thus decided to make amends for those who were mistreated and colonized in Asia and in England by being a writer.

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 Beginning of the Career as a Writer
¡@ A. Living both in Paris and London, Orwell deliberately involved himself with social outcasts, impoverished laborers, and tramps to experience and record the life in the lower social class firsthand and to make amends for his sense of guilt, which was originally shaped in Burma.
  1. These experiences resulted in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933 under the pseudonym "George Orwell" for the first time. For fear of the book's being poor sell and of dishonoring his parents, he carefully selected the pseudonym to protect himself and observed the result of the publication. The outcome satisfied him, and the name "George Orwell" thus became his second "self."

B. His experiences in Burma gave abundant resources for him to write about the injustice of British imperialism in India and in Burma.

  1. In 1931, he published the essay "A Hanging," and later, in 1936, the famous essay "Shooting An Elephant." Both essays described his understanding of the injustice, absurd, of British imperialism.
  2. In 1934, the novel Burmese Days allows the readers to experience what Orwell experienced in Burma.

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 Socialist Writer: the 1930's
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  1. In the next few years, Orwell worked as a bookseller's assistant, schoolmaster. The publications in the following years made him a reputation of minor satirical novelist: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), which are all based on his experiences in different period of his life.
  2. In 1936 Orwell visited the north of England to produce a documentary account of unemployment for the Left Book Club. The result was The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1936, the milestone of the reportage of the time.
  3. In the mean time, he married Eileen O'shaughnessy, an Oxford graduate and psychology student. From 1936 to 1940, they moved to Wallingford, Hertfordshire and ran a grocery. This farming and peaceful life with Eileen was the happiest time in Orwell's life.
  4. The turning point was the Spanish Civil War. As a socialist, Orwell joined the Spanish Civil War, fighting with the leftist against Fascism; however, this experience not only made him wounded seriously, but also eventually disillusioned him. He never joined any political party, but established himself as an independent left.
  5. His book about this period of time in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, was published in 1938.

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 World War II ¡@
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  1. During the war, Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and worked as a journalist for the BBC. He also worked as literary editor in Observer, Tribune, and Horizon.
  2. Animal Farm, finished in 1944 but published in 1945 for some political reasons, made him a well-known writer and gave him a secure financial support hereafter. The novel is a fable that satirizes the leadership of the Soviet Union and the betrayal of a revolution. In the novel, Orwell tells a story of the animal characters as an allegory for what he calls "the corruption of language" and the hypocrisy of communism. The following slogan of the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) perfectly shows Orwell's satiric intent : "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.. . .A rat is a dog is a pig is a boy." Though apparently meaning that all animals are equal, PeTA states that "fighting animals", game chickens and "fighting breeds" of dogs, do not have even the right to exist.
  3. While he was reporting the fall of Germany, his wife died at the age of 40 in England.

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 His later life
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  1. In 1947, Orwell published his influential essay, "Politics and the English Language," which focused on his observation of the corruption of language. This was also what Orwell kept emphasizing on the plain style of prose, not the use of euphemism to obscure the reality and to serve the tool of totalitarianism.
  2. Orwell took his adopted son Richard to the remote Scottish island of Jura, where his final novel was finished. However, his health was deteriorated.
  3. The final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, placed Orwell as one of the greatest novelists in the history of English literature. With a dark and uncomfortable atmosphere, the novel presents the twist of human nature and the destruction of language: "War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength."
  4. In 1949, he married Sonia Browell, who was an editor of Horizon.
  5. Because of tuberculosis, he died in January 23 at the age of 47 in London.

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 Orwell as an Essayist
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  1. Although Orwell is best-known for his novel, his essays are among the finest of the 20th-century. In "Why I Write?" and "Politics and the English Language," Orwell claims that it is the obligation of writers to fight against social injustice, oppression, and the power of totalitarian regimes. His view of the class-bounded language has had a deep influence on the political discourse of our time.
  2. "Shooting An Elephant" is the early best narrative essay that Orwell has ever written. The content of the story is the process of shooting an elephant; however, the techniques that Orwell applies to the essay generate the tension and irony of the situation, and make the reader think more and more deeply about British imperialism in India and Burma. The language is simple, without any excessive use of modifiers to help the story proceed. For him, writing a good prose should be "as clear as a windowpane," which almost describes his own intellectual integrity.

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Reference

On-Line Source
BBC Education-Biography. 2 Sep. 2002. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/centurions/orwell/orwbiog.shtml>

Bernard Crick. George Orwell: A Life. George Orwell Home. 2 Sep. 2002. <http://orwell.ru/home.htm>

Essays: George Orwell. 2 Sep. 2002. <http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/essays/orwell.htm>

Jones, Landon Y. George Orwell. People Weekly. Jan. 9, 1984. Charles' George Orwell Links: The Homepage of Orwell Homepages. 2 Sep. 2002. <http://pages.citenet.net/users/charles/col-01.html>

Books
Abrams, M. H. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volumn 2. 6th edition. New york: Norton, 1993. 2227-2228.
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