Abstract
The language of George Orwell makes an intensely distinctive contribution to the character of modern writing in English. Having said that, his reputation perhaps has him in the shadow of some slightly earlier, more obviously ‘experimental’ modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, who are all known for specific stylistic techniques which have helped to shape modern literature. Joyce and Woolf, for example, developed styles for representing the thoughts and preoccupations of their characters; Joyce is known for inventive word-play and for juxtaposing different styles and even scraps of foreign languages in a linguistic collage, a feature also of some of Eliot’s poetry. Lawrence developed a very recognisable, syntactically and metaphorically elaborate language for exploring and commenting on his characters’ psyches. In the 1930s, Orwell made his experiments with avant-garde techniques, and was not comfortable with them (see Chapters 6 and 8). His goal was truth rather than stylistic impact, and to attain his artistic ambitions he used a variety of ways of writing. But his best work is as individually recognisable and as original in style as that of any of the modernists.
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Notes
‘Why I Write’ (1946), CEJL, I, 30); G. Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967) Part 4, pp. 229ff.
See R. Fowler, Linguistic Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
See R. Fowler, Linguistics and the Novel (London: Methuen, 1983) 2nd edn
Useful critical introductions to Orwell’s fiction include J. R. Hammond, A George Orwell Companion (London: Macmillan, 1982)
R. A. Lee, Orwell’s Fiction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969)
V. Meyers, George Orwell (London: Macmillan, 1991).
J. Meyers (ed.) George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
R. Williams (ed.) George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974).
On Russian Formalism and on Czech and French structuralism see T. Bennett Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979)
J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)
V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1965)
J. Ehrmann (ed.) Structuralism (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1970)
T. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977)
L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis (eds) Russian Formalist Criticism (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
R. Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960) pp. 350, 352.
The whole area of stylistics, its various specialisms, its history and its antecedents, and related topics and approaches in linguistics and in literary theory, is covered in K. Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics (London: Longman, 1989).
D. Birch, Language, Literature, and Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 1989).
R. Carter (ed.) Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982)
A Cluysenaar, Introduction to Literary Stylistics (London: Batsford Academic, 1976)
D. C. Freeman (ed.) Linguistics and Literary Style (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970)
G. N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longman, 1969)
H. G. Widdowson, Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature (London: Longman, 1975).
M. A. K. Halliday, ‘The Linguistic Study of Literary Texts’ (1964), reprinted in S. Chatman and S. R. Levin (eds) Essays on the Language of Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967) p. 217.
The term ‘literary competence’ for the special knowledge which allows a reader to read literature as literature was coined by J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
R. Fowler, Literature as Social Discourse (London: Batsford Academic, 1981).
‘Linguistic criticism’ or ‘critical linguistics’ has its origin in the late 1970s with the work of a group of linguists who used a Hallidayan functional grammar to explore a theory, and a practical analytic understanding, of the way texts mediate ideology in social settings. The pioneer works were R. Fowler, R. Hodge, G. Kress and T. Trew, Language and Control (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)
R. Hodge and G. Kress, Language as Ideology ([1979], (London: Routledge, 1993) 2nd edn.
See R. Fowler, Language in the News (London: Routledge, 1991).
M. Birch and M. O’Toole, Functions of Style (London: Pinter, 1988)
R. Carter and P. Simpson (eds) Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
M. Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London: Routledge, 1988)
M. Toolan (ed.) Language, Text and Context: Essays in Stylistics (London: Routledge, 1992)
M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (London: Edward Arnold, 2nd ed., 1994)
S. Chatman (ed.) Literary Style: A Symposium (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) pp. 330–64.
M. A. K. Halliday, ‘Language Structure and Language function,’ in J. Lyons (ed.) New Horizons in Linguistics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) p. 142.
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© 1995 Roger Fowler
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Fowler, R. (1995). Preliminaries. In: The Language of George Orwell. The Language of Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24210-8_2
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