Orwell and Modernism

Abstract To consider how Orwell himself perceived, evaluated, and was influenced by those ‘highbrow’ writers who epitomized formal experimentalism in his lifetime, and to account for how and why critics continue to differ over Orwell’s modernist credentials, this chapter situates Orwell’s writing in relation to changing definitions of literary modernism, and puts Orwell’s explicit commentaries on what he called ‘the Joyce-Eliot school’ into dialogue with tendencies apparent in Orwell’s fiction. With a focus on Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), it aims to show how, both expressly and through narrative technique, the fiction challenges some of the dichotomies on which Orwell’s critical commentary relies, including the presumed separation of modernism from mass culture, and the supposed opposition between formal experiment and political engagement. In this, Orwell anticipates recent trends in the broader field of modernism studies.