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"Rodden, John"
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Michael Collins at 100: Exaltation or Execration?
In the wake of the heightened attention accorded Michael Collins on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of his death in August 2022, this review essay addresses both the most recent and the most influential scholarly and popular treatments of his life and legacy. This material provides a window on both Ireland’s past and present – and also its future. When addressing Collins’s role in that contentious and much-contested past, new and more established scholarly studies by biographers and historians assist us not only to understand it better, but likewise also grasp the unique symbolic role that Collins occupies in Irish political life today. The fact is that many Irish people – and Irish Americans – simply cannot easily talk about Collins in balanced terms, or with the sort of historical detachment that they can bring to other bygone leaders of Ireland. He is a lightning rod for controversy in contemporary Ireland, with his very name sparking a debate whenever politically minded Irishmen get together. Unlike other Irish historical figures who have largely receded into the past, his life and death remain subjects of fascination on a national scale, with radio and television documentaries, fictionalised dramatisations, and even multimedia spectacles dedicated to the scrutiny of his brief life and tragic death. The review essay covers more than twenty biographies and biographical portraits, the majority of which have appeared in the twenty-first century, along with three dozen Collins-themed topical monographs as well as several research articles and selected pieces of journalism.
Journal Article
The Cambridge introduction to George Orwell
\"Arguably the most influential political writer of the twentieth century, George Orwell remains a crucial voice for our times. Known world-wide for his two best-selling masterpieces Nineteen Eighty-Four, a gripping portrait of a dystopian future, and Animal Farm, a brilliant satire on the Russian Revolution, Orwell has been revered as an essayist, journalist and literary-political intellectual, and his works have exerted a powerful international impact on the post-World War Two era. This Introduction examines Orwell's life, work and legacy, addressing his towering achievement and his ongoing appeal. Combining important biographical detail with close analysis of his writings, the book considers the various genres in which Orwell wrote: the realistic novel, the essay, journalism and the anti-utopia. Ideally suited for readers approaching Orwell's work for the first time, the book concludes with an extended reflection on why George Orwell has enjoyed a literary afterlife unprecedented among modern authors in any language\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Worlds of Irving Howe
The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy is a wide-ranging anthology of criticism devoted to the literary, cultural, and political work of the writer Irving Howe. The book offers a broad cross-section of critical and biographical writings about Howe. Collected here are assessments of Howe's work written by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, and Arthur Schlesinger. The critical estimates of Howe's major books, collected here and framed by a major biographical introduction by John Rodden, constitute a sharply focused lens through which readers can re-evaluate the legacy of one of American's leading intellectuals and thereby understand the main issues of twentieth-century Anglo-American cultural history. Contributors: Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Newton Arvin, Charles Angoff, Edward Dahlberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Richard Chase, H.D. Lasswell, Dennis Wrong, Michael Harrington, Christopher Lasch, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Schlesinger, Theodore Solotaroff, Clive James, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and William Phillips, among others.
eBook
The unexamined Orwell
Continuing his masterful investigation of the ongoing reception and continual reinvention of George Orwell six decades after his death, Rodden delves into numerous aspects of Orwell’s legacy that have been surprisingly neglected.
eBook
Every Intellectual's Big Brother
George Orwell has been embraced, adopted, and co-opted by everyone from the far left to the neoconservatives. Each succeeding generation of Anglo-American intellectuals has felt compelled to engage the life, work, and cultural afterlife of Orwell, who is considered by many to have been the foremost political writer of the twentieth century.Every Intellectual's Big Brotherexplores the ways in which numerous disparate groups, Orwell's intellectual \"siblings,\" have adapted their views of Orwell to fit their own agendas and how in doing so they have changed our perceptions of Orwell himself. By examining the politics of literary reception as a dimension of cultural history, John Rodden gives us a better understanding of Orwell's unique and enduring role in Anglo-American intellectual life.
In Part One, Rodden opens the book with a section titled \"Their Orwell, Left and Right,\" which focuses on Orwell's reception by several important literary circles of the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Orwell's own contemporaries, Rodden addresses the ways various intellectual groups of the 1950s responded to Orwell. Rodden then moves on in Part Two to what he calls the \"Orwell Confraternity Today,\" those contemporary intellectuals who have, in various ways, identified themselves with or reacted against Orwell. The author concludes by examining how Orwell's status as an object of admiration and detraction has complicated the way in which he has been perceived by readers since his death.
eBook
The Orwellian “Amerika” of Donald J. Trump?
Is President Donald J. Trump really George Orwell’s Big Brother in the flesh? Ever since Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, the mainstream American media have depicted him as such, with his defenders in the conservative press and broadcast outlets accusing his opponents of doublethink and thoughtcrime. This article examines the extraordinary way in which the Trump administration has become a magnet for the language of Newspeak, a contested site where the catchwords of 1984 are bandied ceaselessly by his allies as well as his adversaries.
Journal Article
George Orwell, the Movies, Wartime England and Me
In this biographical memoir, introduced by his colleague John Rodden, Peter Davison recalls his service in the film production agency of Great Britain during World War II, and offers thoughts on George Orwell.
Journal Article
Cyrano at 400
The quadri-centennial of the birth of Cyrano de Bergerac was an occasion widely commemorated in France throughout 2019, yet it was largely ignored in the anglophone world. This article discusses both the seventeenth-century historical Cyrano, the author and soldier, and the eponymous nineteenth-century romantic drama that established his fame as the poet-orator with “a nose like a peninsula.” Written in rhymed couplets by Edmond Rostand in 1897, the play resurrected the near-forgotten historical Cyrano and immortalized him, taking poetic liberties that transformed “Cyrano” into both a name recognized on every continent and the best-known French literary hero ever created.
Journal Article
Brexit and Westminster’s “Ulsterior Motives”
The chances are growing that an unexpected consequence of the 2016 UK referendum to exit the European Union (or “Brexit”) may eventuate in the unexpected development of Northern Ireland exiting the UK, or what might be termed “NIRexit.” In other words, Brexit may lead to Irish unification. The long-cherished dream of Irish nationalists for “a united Ireland” may therefore be the inadvertent consequence of the campaign to withdraw from the EU by the Brexiteers. Both demographics and economics are pushing Dublin and Belfast ever closer together. The increasing likelihood is that the attractions of remaining in the EU will be more important to Northern Irish citizens than age-old anxieties about joining the traditionally Catholic dominated Irish Republic. “Potatoes, not popes” may weigh more heavily than historical divisions between the Catholic south and the Irish north, especially because the Irish Republic is no longer dominated by the Catholic Church.
Journal Article