Loading…
‘Stones Hard’ and a ‘Sea like Glass’: Orwell’s island pastoral
This case study considers the northern island environment in which George Orwell lived during the immediate post-war period prior to the final completion of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), as observed in his diaries. His existence in the remote northern edge of the island of Jura at the advent of, in h...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Default Book chapter |
| Published: |
2018
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/2134/23561 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | This case study considers the northern island environment in which George Orwell lived during the immediate post-war period prior to the final completion of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), as observed in his diaries. His existence in the remote northern edge of the island of Jura at the advent of, in his own phrase, the Cold War, has received surprisingly little critical examination. There are few attempts to connect his experience while there, including a syntheses of his island and other related incidents in images within the novel itself. This chapter therefore re-examines biographies of Orwell and relevant critical texts, combined with observations from site visits to the remote house ‘‘Barnhill’’ which he rented from late May 1946 towards the end of his life. As Orwell’s ideal pastoral environment has been little attended to within versions of the writer’s life, the central question remains, why Orwell had seemingly absented himself from the earlier spheres of cultural influence and the fierce zones of action which he reported on within a vast journalistic output. |
|---|