Nineteen Eighty-four - Wordsworth Classics - George Orwell

Descripción

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue.

The Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother - 1984 itself: these terms and concepts have moved from the world of fiction into our everyday lives. They are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression; yet they were newly created by George Orwell in 1949 as he conjured his dystopian vision of a world where totalitarian power is absolute. In this novel, continuously popular since its first publication, readers can explore the dark and extraordinary world he brought so fully to life. The principal characters who lead us through that world are ordinary human beings like ourselves: Winston Smith and Julia, whose falling in love is also an act of rebellion against the Party. Opposing them are the massed powers of the state, which watches its citizens on all sides through technology now only too familiar to us. No-one is free from surveillance; the past is constantly altered, so that there is no truth except the most recent version; and Big Brother, both loved and feared, controls all. Even the simple act of keeping a diary - as Winston does - is punishable by death. In Winston's battle to keep his freedom of thought, he has a powerful adversary in O'Brien, who uses fear and pain to enter his very thought processes. Does 2 2 4? Or is it 5? We find out in Room 101. Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell's last novel; but the world he created is always with us, as successive generations of readers find within it a mirror for their own times and a warning for the future.


GEORGE ORWELL
Eric Blair George Orwell as he was to become when a published writer was a child of the Empire, born in Bengal, India, on June 25, 1903, the second child of Richard and Ida Blair. Richard was a civil servant in the Opium Department the trade between India and China having been legalised under British rule . In 1904, his wife Ida, 18 years his junior, took the baby Eric and his older sister Marjorie back to England to live. Richard visited on leave only once, for 3 months in 1907, the point when Eric's younger sister Avril was conceived. He retired back to England in 1911, the same year in which the eight-year-old Eric was sent to boarding school. Eric's formative early years were thus spent entirely in his father's absence.

Eric Blair's time at his preparatory school, St. Cyprian's, is recalled in his brief memoir, 'Such, such were the joys' 1947 1952 , a coruscating account of the 'desolate loneliness and helplessness' he felt there, though he also cautions, 'Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity'. From there he won places at both Eton and Wellington, and after a term at Wellington he took up a scholarship at Eton. He was by his own account reasonably happy there; a school built on and for privilege, it could also accommodate the contrarian. His biographer Bernard Crick notes of his lack of academic prowess at Eton, 'There was no denying that it had been an undistinguished career.' But it gave him an unrivalled understanding of the class system which would become one of his central subjects. And it was there, as he tells us in 'Why I Write' 1946 , that he discovered a joy in words for their own sake.

On leaving school in 1921, Eric initially chose to follow his father and grandfather into the Indian service, taking the India Office examinations for entry into the Indian Imperial Police Force as well as academic exams, there was a practical test in horse-riding . In 1922, aged 19, he headed to Burma to join the forces of imperialism. His iconic essays, 'A Hanging' 1931, written still under his own name and 'Shooting an Elephant' 1936 , describe in retrospect pivotal events during his time in Burma. His first novel, Burmese Days, published under his new pseudonym George Orwell, likewise draws heavily on his experience there. Reading these works will give a good enough explanation of why, when home on leave in 1927, Blair resigned from the Service, without giving a reason. He had come to the point where he could no longer subscribe to the imperialism he was serving.

This decision marks a key moment of change in Eric Blair's life. He says in 'Why I Write', 'From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer'. Now he moved to London and began to write. The key stages of his life are marked by key publications. Orwell was always engaged in a mass of journalism and reviewing. Seeing Things As They Are: Selected Journalism reflects that large body of work. The principal works now begin to be written, with the essay 'A Hanging', published in the periodical Adelphi, announcing his characteristic style and concerns. His first major work was Down and Out in Paris and London 1933 , reflecting his own immersion in the life of the poor and dispossessed in those two cities. He found it difficult to place with a publisher, but through Leonard Moore, who would be his lifelong agent, he found a publisher in Victor Gollancz. Down and Out has become a classic. Writing directly from experience was to be a fundamental method, and possibly because of the autobiographical nature of this early work, Eric Blair now chose to take the pseudonym George Orwell - the name by which we think of him. A change of name, a change of identity, a move away from identification with a past that included Eton and Empire and towards a future investigating, and sometimes occupying, the place of the working class, the poor, the oppressed, the overlooked. There would be many other subjects too, but from now on Orwell's writing and indeed his life had a deeply political dimension.

Orwell had also been experimenting with fiction, and his first novel, Burmese Days followed in 1934; A Clergyman's Daughter in 1935; and Keep the Aspidistra Flying in 1936. Then came a further breakthrough when Gollancz commissioned Orwell who had been supporting himself through teaching and then bookselling to write about working-class conditions in the North of England, on the model of Down and Out. The result was another classic, The Road to Wigan Pier 1937 , again demonstrating his forte in political writing informed by lived experience. Lodging in working-class houses, observing closely housing conditions, going down a mine, living in both Wigan and Barnsley, he turned his shock at the poverty of people's lives into a polemical documentary account that has remained original in form and content. It ends with Orwell's political commitment: 'There is no chance of righting the conditions I have described, or of saving England from Fascism, unless we can bring an effective Socialist party into existence'. Immediately after his months spent in the North, he married Eileen O'Shaughnessy in June 1936, and in December he was off again to Spain, carrying his commitment to Socialism to sacrificial lengths, and embroiling himself in the internal conflicts of the various forces of the left fighting for Republicanism. He was wounded in the throat in action, and narrowly escaped imprisonment. His experiences there issued in Homage to Catalonia 1938 , and a number of significant essays. 1938 was also the year in which Orwell's tuberculosis began to impair him seriously. He was confined to a sanatorium for six months.

On convalescence with Eileen in Morocco, Orwell began to write his fourth novel, Coming Up for Air 1939 . Though Orwell's chronic chest weakness disqualified him from military service in the Second World War, he kept trying to enlist; the best he could do was to join the Home Guard in 1940. If he couldn't fight, he could write: The Lion and the Unicorn 1941 was a reflection on his own form of patriotic Socialism. In 1941 he joined the BBC as a Talks Producer in the Empire Department, broadcasting largely to India and South-East Asia, all the while continuing with his prodigious output of journalism, reviewing, and essays, including the important 'Looking Back on the Spanish War' 1942 . He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the left-wing journal Tribune, to which he made many contributions himself. At the very same time he was writing Animal Farm, and also thinking ahead to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Animal Farm was written at speed, and completed by February 1944, but publishers looked askance at a book which seemed to be an attack on the USSR, still an ally in the war. His usual publisher Gollancz refused it, as did others. Eventually it was accepted by Frederick Warburg and published in 1945. It was an immediate success and has never been out of print.

If Orwell's life seems dominated by writing, in his personal life the major event of 1944 was that he and Eileen adopted a baby son, Richard. In March 1945 he went off as a war correspondent for the Observer, apparently unconcerned by the fact that Eileen was ill. While he was in Germany, Eileen died during what he had thought was a routine operation - in fact a hysterectomy to remove multiple tumours. Richard was now in his sole care. His first response to this was to ask several women to marry him, but he then settled to the responsibilities of fatherhood in what was to be the last phase of his life. He employed Susan Watson to care for Richard and to some extent himself , in London, then in the remote island of Jura, at Barnhill, a tenancy acquired through the good auspices of David Astor, where his sister Avril joined him. Many have wondered why Orwell chose such an apparently inhospitable spot, but his Domestic Diary reflects his real happiness there; and it was where he wrote his most important novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Between 1946 and 1948, with a seven-month interval in a sanatorium to combat his ever more virulent tuberculosis, Orwell drove himself to finish his visionary 'novel about the future', typing the revisions and the final typescript himself in the absence of secretarial help, an act which probably hastened his death. As soon as it was finished, he again entered a sanatorium. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949; its publisher Warburg described it as 'amongst the most terrifying books I have read'. It has had a fertile and influential life beyond its author's death. Orwell moved to University College Hospital in London in September 1949. He married Sonia Brownell the following month; both knew how gravely ill he was. Plans were under way to go to a sanatorium in Switzerland when he died from a lung haemorrhage in January 1950. His son Richard was brought up by his aunt Avril, and has been a voice for his father's life and work into the 21st century.

Edad: adultos

———————————————————————————————————————————
Este producto pertenece a la tienda oficial de SBS Librerías, una de las empresas más importantes de nuestro país dedicada a la comercialización de libros, donde podés comprar todos nuestros productos de manera rápida, segura y con los más altos estándares de un servicio garantizado que cuenta con las mejores métricas de calidad de Mercado Libre.
Conocé más de nuestros productos ingresando a nuestra tienda oficial:
https://tienda.mercadolibre.com.ar/sbs-librerias

Características de nuestros servicios:

ENVIOS
Contamos con dos modalidades de entrega:
Envío Flex: Es el servicio de entrega más rápido que se ofrece dentro de la plataforma y exclusivo para algunas regiones en donde las compras son entregados en el día o bien al día siguiente. El horario de entrega de las compras despachadas bajo esta modalidad de entrega es entre las 12:00 y las 21:00 y en caso de no poder concretarse en el primer intento de entrega, se realiza una segunda visita dentro de las próximas 24 a 48 hs hábiles. En determinados momentos del año, o bien en fechas especiales, realizamos entregas los días sábados por este servicio.
De acuerdo al código postal ingresado por el comprador, Mercado Libre informará si se encuentra en una región en donde se ofrezca este servicio de entrega rápida.
Mercado Envíos: Ofrecido en todas las regiones no cubiertas por el servicio de Envío Flex. El día de entrega para estos envíos es el estimado por Mercado Libre para el código postal ingresado por el comprador. Las entregas de estas órdenes las realizan los operadores logísticos designados por Mercado Libre en el horario de 9 a 18 hs.
También será posible para esta modalidad de entrega, el retiro de las compras en delegaciones de correos y otros puntos.

En todos los casos, para conocer los costos de envío podés ingresar tu código postal a la derecha de la publicación donde dice “ver más formas de entrega”
Para realizar el seguimiento de tu pedido, debés ingresar a la parte de compras en el detalle de la misma. Allí figurará el número de envío una vez que se encuentre despachado.
Importante: Una vez ingresado el domicilio de entrega y realizada la compra, no se encuentra a nuestro alcance la posibilidad de realizar cambios sobre la misma. Dependiendo del estado en que se encuentre la compra, se podrá cancelar la misma y volver a realizarla ingresando el domicilio de entrega correcto.

PAGO
Aceptamos todos los medios de pago aceptados por Mercado Pago y los mismos pueden ser consultados a la derecha de la publicación en la sección de “Más información” que se encuentra debajo del precio de la publicación.
Emitimos factura A y en caso de generarse percepciones, las mismas deberán ser abonadas mediante Mercado Pago.

CAMBIOS Y DEVOLUCIONES
Hasta 10 (diez) días desde la fecha de recepción de la compra. Los productos deben encontrarse en el mismo estado en que fueron recibidos y se deberá gestionar mediante el canal privado de la compra o bien contactando a nuestro Servicio de Atención al Cliente.

Equipo de Atención al Cliente de SBS Librerías