Concetti Chiave
- George Orwell is a pseudonym for Eric Blair, who chose the name from a common English name and a river.
- Born in India, a British colony, Orwell developed socialist and atheist views during his studies at Eton.
- His early experiences as a dishwasher and homeless man connected him with the working class.
- Orwell's major works, "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-four," reflect his shift from middle-class ideas to a focus on social issues.
- Unlike contemporaries like Joyce and Woolf, Orwell wrote novels with a teaching aim, addressing social and political problems.
Orwell
He had a life rich of events. First of all George Orwell is a pseudonym used for publishing his works. George is a common name, very used in that period because of the patron of England, while Orwell is referred to a name of a river. His true name is Eric Blair and he was born in India, that is an English colony. He studied at Eton and when he attended the school he began to mature his political position and it developed an independent personality characterized by socialism and atheism, so his position are referred to left extremism.
Both (socialism and atheism) wanted egalitarianism and the abolition of the private property. After graduating he begins to travel, he at first becomes a dishwasher and then also an homeless so he is in contact with poor people. He wrote “Homage to Catalonia” based on his experience during the Spanish Civil war. He becomes also a reporter of the BBC and after his experiences he published his 2 masterpieces: “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-four (1984)”. We have a shift from middle class to poor people, because he abandons middle class ideas and he becomes very linked to the working class. With Orwell we have a new type of novel, the political social problems novels, differently from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Like Dickens he wrote educational social problem novels and so all his novels have a teaching aim, because he wanted to inform the readers o the reality of the time and these novels deal with socal political problems.