摘要：Although George Orwell is often described as a “pioneer” of Cultural Studies,
his essays, articles and broadcasts on cultural themes have rarely been analysed in
much depth. One of the reasons for this is that he tends to be perceived as an out-andout
maverick whose writings had nothing in common with those of other cultural
critics. The purpose of the following article, which has been adapted from my
forthcoming book Orwell and Marxism (I.B. Tauris, 2008), is to challenge Orwell’s
status as an intellectual outsider by relating his work to broader trends in the radical
culture of his day. The main argument of the book is that there are some startling
parallels between Orwell’s cultural writings and those of the young literary
intellectuals who were either members of, or closely associated with, the Communist
Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the 1930s and 1940s.1 The present article explores some of these parallels by focusing on Orwell’s ideas about the nature of
“Englishness,” primarily as they took shape in his two short books The Lion and the
Unicorn (1941) and The English People (1947). These books are arguably the most
important works of cultural criticism which Orwell ever wrote, since they go a long
way towards his explaining his admiration for the English working class — and hence
his reasons for becoming a socialist.
