After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears and the English Political Novel, 1950-2010
type: CreativeWork
description: After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears and the English Political Novel, 1950-2010 gives a coherent account of the English political novel after World War II, a critical narrative absent from current scholarship. I contend that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a touchstone for political fiction, is underwritten by Orwell's conflicted attitude toward politics: despite embracing politics as the necessary means to genuinely improve people's lives, he also remained suspicious of politics' apparently inherent potential to diminish or even eliminate autonomy. Orwell's simultaneous attraction and vigorous resistance to politics, I argue, is tied to broader contemporaneous anxieties over political and cultural totalization. Such fears reverberate throughout postwar English political fiction. To substantiate this claim, my project reads an assortment of political novels against the political convulsions and reorientations following the Second World War. Orwellian apprehensions over totalizing systems and theories serve as a common thread for otherwise wide-ranging novelistic engagements with politics in the postmodern, multicultural, and globalized contexts of postwar England.
abstract: After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears and the English Political Novel, 1950-2010 gives a coherent account of the English political novel after World War II, a critical narrative absent from current scholarship. I contend that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a touchstone for political fiction, is underwritten by Orwell's conflicted attitude toward politics: despite embracing politics as the necessary means to genuinely improve people's lives, he also remained suspicious of politics' apparently inherent potential to diminish or even eliminate autonomy. Orwell's simultaneous attraction and vigorous resistance to politics, I argue, is tied to broader contemporaneous anxieties over political and cultural totalization. Such fears reverberate throughout postwar English political fiction. To substantiate this claim, my project reads an assortment of political novels against the political convulsions and reorientations following the Second World War. Orwellian apprehensions over totalizing systems and theories serve as a common thread for otherwise wide-ranging novelistic engagements with politics in the postmodern, multicultural, and globalized contexts of postwar England.
author: Ayres, Jackson
keywords: Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, Political novels, Postwar literature, Literature in English, British Isles, Modern Literature
date published: 2013-05-01T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T00:59:49Z
provider: University of Arkansas
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Arkansas