All Art Is Propaganda · Critical Essays (Before Orwell)

As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary."how to be interesting, line after line."

Contents:

Charles Dickens

Boys' Weeklies

Inside the Whale

Drama Reviews: The Tempest, The Peaceful Inn

Film Review: The Great Dictator

Wells, Hitler and the World State

The Art of Donald McGill

No, Not One

Rudyard Kipling

T.S. Eliot

Can Socialists Be Happy?

Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali

Propaganda and Demotic Speech

Raffles and Miss Blandish

Good Bad Books

The Prevention of Literature

Politics and the English Language

Confessions of a Book Reviewer

Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool

Writers and Leviathan

Review of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

Reflections on Gandhi