George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London

Bluemel, K.

ISBN 10: 1349732664 / ISBN 13: 9781349732661

Published by MacMillan, 2004

About this Item

Print on Demand pp. 246.

Seller Inventory # 385690716

Bibliographic Details

• Title: George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London
• Publisher: MacMillan
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1349732664
• ISBN 13: 9781349732661
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics celebrates the lives, literature, and politics of a group of four 'radical eccentrics' - the Tory anarchist poet Stevie Smith, the Marxist Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand, and the glamour-girl-turned-socialist Inez Holden - who formed a friendly circle around the famously radical and eccentric George Orwell. Demonstrating that Smith, Anand, and Holden matter for literary history just as they mattered for Orwell, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics gives name and shape to a neglected movement within interwar and wartime English writing. It focuses on the lives and texts of Smith, Anand, and Holden in order to argue that these three writers throw into question limiting assumptions about art and politics-about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire-in ways that their group's most influential radical, Orwell, cannot. Embarking upon a kind of biographical-political-cultural-literary criticism, this book brings the radical eccentrics' vital, potentially transformative conversation to the attention of scholars of English literature for the first time, suggesting fascinating new approaches to the study of literary London during the thirties and forties.

About the Author

KRISTIN BLUEMEL is Associate Professor of English at Monmouth University in New Jersey, USA.