The Prevention of Literature E-Book

George Orwell

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 33

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In The Prevention of Literature, the third in the Orwell's Essays series, Orwell considers the freedom of thought and expression. He discusses the effect of the ownership of the press on the accuracy of reports of events, and takes aim at political language, which 'consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together.' The Prevention of Literature is a stirring cry for freedom from censorship, which Orwell says must start with the writer themselves: 'To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly.'

Leseprobe

the prevention of literature

the orwell’s essays series

i. Why I Write

ii. Politics and the English Language

iii. The Prevention of Literature

iv. Politics vs. Literature

v. Shooting an Elephant

vi. England Your England

vii. Orwell on Reading

viii. Inside the Whale

ix. A Hanging

x. Decline of the English Murder

The Preventionof Literature

george orwell

renard press

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The Prevention of Literature first published in 1946

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2021

Edited text © Renard Press Ltd, 2021

Extra Material © Renard Press Ltd, 2021

Cover design by Will DadyExtra Material edited by Tom Conaghan

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contents

The Prevention of Literature

Notes

Extra Material

the prevention of literature

About a year agoI attended a meeting of the PEN Club,* the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton’s Aeropagitica* – a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defence of freedom of the press. Milton’s famous phrase about the sin of ‘killing’ a book was printed on the leaflets advertising the meetingwhich had been circulated beforehand.

There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in very general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenityin literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defence of the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it; others were simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty – the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print – seemed to be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticise and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books which have been ‘killed’ in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favour of censorship.1

There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the MOI (Ministry of Information)*