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SCENES FROM AN AFTERLIFE
The Legacy of George Orwell
By John Rodden
List Item No. 340
ISBN: 1-932236-01-5 (cloth)
350 pages
List Price: $25.00
Internet Special: $21.25 — PRE
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2003 marks the centenary of George Orwell's birth. If John Rodden is correct, it also marks the end of the Orwell century. No other author, he convincingly argues, has left a more enduring imprint on the last one hundred years.
This assertion is amply supported in Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell, Rodden's masterful and wide-ranging account of the impact and appropriation of Orwell and his ideas since his death in 1950. Considered by different groups and at different times as a prophet, secular saint, model leftist, exemplary liberal, proto-neoconservative, or would-be Tory, among many other things, Orwell, "the Zelig of modern intellectuals," was a writer with whom virtually every intellectual movement of the late twentieth-century felt it must contend.
Rodden, one of the world's leading Orwell scholars, sorts through the uses to which Orwell has been put in the last few decades, suggesting where, when, and why Orwell's friends and followers have sinned in conscripting him for this or that cause. Rodden ends by arguing that although Orwell's own explicit contention that he was a socialist should not be dismissed, we must understand that he was nevertheless no progressive, but rather a thinker who fits best in the non-Marxist, radical Tory tradition of Morris, Cobbett, and Dickens.
What They're Saying...
"It…contains a great many insights. In dissecting Orwell's politics Rodden rightly emphasizes his nostalgic populism and his deep debt to William Cobbett and Dickens."
—Atlantic Monthly
"Everybody who thinks about Orwell or who studies his influence owes a debt of scholarly gratitude to the seriousness of John Rodden."
—Christopher Hitchens, author, Why Orwell Matters
"John Rodden's impressive research and scrupulous analysis explains why Orwell has maintained a vigorous hold on the popular imagination."
—Jeffrey Meyers, author, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation
"John Rodden's first book, The Politics of Literary Reputation, was a definitive guide to bewildering variety of George Orwell's reception and reputation and, indeed, to Orwell's work itself. By 1984 it seemed that the almost mythic identification of so many different kinds or readers with Orwell had at last reached its climax. But as Rodden's new book on Orwell shows, this extraordinary story continues-in popular culture, in revealing biographies, and especially in the opening up of truly Orwellian societies in the former Soviet Union and East Germany. Scenes From an Afterlife is a worthy and engrossing sequel to its distinguished predecessor."
—Morris Dickstein, CUNY Graduate Center
"An afterlife? It's more as if Orwell's spirit is breathing and moving again in this book, even in its sharp, dry-eyed accounts of many efforts to don Orwell's mantle and walk his walk. And John Rodden's sojourn in the collapsing East Germany of 1989 reminds us, with all the acuity of Homage to Catalonia, that what matters most in a writer isn't the courage it takes to stand with the left against the right or vice-versa, but the more elusive kind it takes to see and say things that anger both sides or, worse, are taken up by both opportunistically. Here is Orwell, not resurrected, but wonderfully revivified."
—Jim Sleeper, author, The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism.
"George Orwell was one of the major writers of the twentieth century and John Rodden has emerged as one of his major chroniclers and interpreters. In Scenes from an Afterlife, Rodden shows how Orwell's works have been appropriated in venues as diverse as American advertising and Soviet propaganda. To his credit, Rodden does not hesitate to ask the Orwellian follow-up question: are these phenomena in fact so diverse or rather two aspects of modern mass society and its efforts at thought control? Many people breathed a sigh of relief when 1984 seemed to come and go without the realization of Orwell's dire predictions for the future of freedom. With his wide-ranging study of Orwell's cultural afterlife, Rodden raises the disturbing issue of whether we are living in an Orwellian world after all. This book is thought-provoking in the deepest sense of the term."
—Paul A. Cantor, Professor of English, University of Virginia
"Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell is a masterful study of the continuing impact of one of the twentieth-century's most important authors. The leading expert in the field of Orwell scholarship, John Rodden here surveys and explores a rich array of topics, including the extraordinary range of popular responses to Orwell since the year 1984, Orwell's place in the Cold War and post-Cold War history of Eastern Europe, Orwell's biographers, and much more. Written with passion and precision, and with impressive detail and depth, Rodden's book is essential reading for those interested in Orwell, the authority and influence of intellectuals, and the fascinating twists and turns of literary reception and reputation."
—William E. Cain, Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English & Director of American Studies, Wellesley College
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