Orwell Reconsidered - Paperback

by Stephen Ingle (Author)

George Orwell has had a profound influence on modern politics and culture. He is regularly invoked as an authority by journalists, commentators and politicians, and his works speak with increasing relevance to our polarised and media-saturated society.

Stephen Ingle explores Orwell's character, his life and his beliefs by guiding the reader through the main events, private and public, that shaped his life and major works. This includes his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War as well as the writing of classics like Animal Farm and 1984. The book also reconsiders Orwell's legacy and contextualises his contemporary resonance. Orwell, it is argued, is more concerned with morality than ideology.

This book will be of significant interest to students and other readers interested in Orwell's life as well as his profound contribution to the history of social and political thought and English literature.

Author Biography

Stephen Ingle is an Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Stirling where he has held a post since 1991. He had previously spent over twenty years in the Politics Department at the University of Hull, for the last four of which he was Head of Department. He came to Stirling to re-establish a largely defunct Politics Department and headed the new department for eleven years. He has pursued research in two principal areas, politics and literature and British political parties, and has written extensively on both. He is especially interested in that area where politics and imaginative literature overlap and has had a special interest in George Orwell's political thought for most of his working life. His works include: Socialist Thought in Imaginative Literature (1979), Parliament and Health Politics (1981), The British Party System (first edition 1985; fourth edition 2008), George Orwell: A Political Life (1993), Narratives of British Socialism (2002) and The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell (2006). Though he has done some teaching at the University of Edinburgh, since formally retiring Stephen Ingle has managed to devote much of his time to three major pastimes: reading, walking and travelling.