Animal Farm
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
4. How
do elements of irony work in the novel?
George
Orwell. Animal
Farm.
(1945,
United Kingdom)
Key Terms (tags): novel, irony,
twentieth century, english literature
Supporting References:
- Poorly written overview videos: http://www.60secondrecap.com/library/animal-farm/
- Birch, Dinah. "Animal Farm." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013
“Animal Farm. By George
*Orwell, published 1945; a satire in beast
fable form on revolutionary and post‐revolutionary Russia (and, by
extension, on all revolutions). The animals of Mr Jones's farm revolt
against their human masters and expel them, the pigs becoming their
egalitarian leaders. However, dominated by Napoleon, their chief, the
pigs become corrupted by power and a new tyranny replaces the old.
The ultimate commandment runs ‘all animals are equal but some
animals are more equal than others’. Napoleon, ruthless and
cynical, represents Stalin, and Snowball, the idealist whom he drives
away, Trotsky. Boxer, the noble carthorse, stands for the strength,
simplicity, and good nature of the common man, but he ends up in the
knacker's yard.”
- Birch, Dinah. "Orwell, George." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Orwell and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Orwell, George
(1903–50) Pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, novelist and political
writer, born in Bengal, India, brought to England when he was 3, and
educated at St Cyprian's prep school (of which his account, ‘Such,
such were the joys’, was considered too libellous to print in this
country until 1968) and at Eton College. He went on to serve with the
Indian Imperial Police in Burma, 1922–7; his uneasy experiences as
a policeman are reflected in his first novel, Burmese Days
(1934), and in two of his finest essays, ‘A Hanging’ and
‘Shooting an Elephant’. He resigned ‘to escape not merely from
imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man’, as he
later put it, and then worked in Paris and London in a series of
ill‐paid jobs and lived off and on among tramps (see Down and
Out in Paris and London, 1933, his first published book),
struggling all the while with the repeated rejection of his work by
publishers. His second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935),
describes the adventures of Dorothy Hare, who through loss of memory
briefly escapes from the confines of her life to join the vagrants
and hop‐pickers of Kent. Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936), which he wrote while working in a Hampstead bookshop,
recounts the literary aspirations and financial humiliations of
Gordon Comstock, a bookseller's assistant. A journey north in 1936,
commissioned by Victor
*Gollancz, produced his vivid and opinionated
account of unemployment, proletarian life, and his fellow socialist
intellectuals, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937, published by
the Left
Book Club). The Spanish Civil War (in which he
fought for the Republicans and was wounded) intensified his political
preoccupations, honed his style, and resulted in Homage to
Catalonia (1938). Orwell's simmering disgust with modernity and
the threat of imminent war hung over his next novel, Coming up
for Air (1939), which focuses on the many frustrations of George
Bowling, a modern everyman, and his yearning for the lost England of
his (and Orwell's) youth. By this stage Orwell saw himself primarily
as a political writer, a democratic socialist who avoided party
labels, hated totalitarianism, and was to become more and more
disillusioned with the methods of communism. V.
S. *Pritchett, reviewing Orwell's The Lion
and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941),
compared him to Daniel
*Defoe and William
*Cobbett both for his ‘subversive,
non‐conforming brand of patriotism’ and for his ‘lucid
conversational style’. His collections of essays include Inside
the Whale (1940), Critical Essays (1946), and Shooting
an Elephant (1950). But his most popular works were and remain
his political satires Animal
Farm (1945) and Nineteen
Eighty‐Four (1949). His first wife, Eileen,
died in 1945, and he married Sonia Mary Brownell in 1949, shortly
before his death from tuberculosis, an illness from which he had
suffered for many years. His Complete Works (20 vols, ed.
Peter Davison) appeared in 1998. See Bernard Crick, George Orwell:
A Life (rev. edn, 1992); Michael Sheldon, Orwell: The
Authorised Biography (1991).”
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