期刊名称：Cultural Logic : an Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice
电子版ISSN：1097-3087
出版年度：2007
出版社：Department of English and Foreign Languages
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 exploressome 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.
