The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell

The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell offers a wide-ranging reconsideration of Orwell’s life and work, focusing on the extensive connections between his novels, essays, diaries, columns, letters, and reviews. Accessible to general readers and to established scholars alike, forty-eight chapters written by an international team of Orwell specialists address familiar topics-such as Orwell’s journalism, broadcasting, literary criticism, and politics-as well as less well-trodden areas of his output, such as his accounts of stupidity, kindness, and justice, and his connections with contemporaries like Jack Common, Katharine Burdekin, Wyndham Lewis, and Victor Serge. Sections on Orwell’s professional activities, his main literary influences, his politics, his intellectual fixations, his literary contemporaries, and his legacies structure the book, which moves thematically and topically through the full scope of his output. The first section looks at how Orwell spent his time as a writer, reader, and broadcaster. Chapters on writers from Shakespeare to the modernists investigate the determinants of Orwell’s literary practice. The book then turns to a set of political contexts in which Orwell’s writing can be understood. The ’Fixations’ section covers the familiar, such as Orwell’s account of Englishness, and the unfamiliar, such as his account of the absurd. The fifth section relates Orwell to several politically minded contemporaries, tracing connections and differences between their writing. The final section of the Handbook reflects on how Orwell sounds through several literary and socio-political legacies, and includes innovative considerations of feminism, Afrofuturism, and queer speculative fiction.

Nathan Waddell is a Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary ModernismÂ(Oxford University Press, 2019) and edited Orwell’s A Clergyman’s DaughterÂfor the Oxford World’s Classics series in 2021, along with The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-FourÂin 2020. He has published widely on Wyndham Lewis, John Buchan, and Ford Madox Ford, and sits on the editorial board of the journal George Orwell Studies.