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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Monday, November 27, 2023

BOOK NEWS: Study of Orwell's Ethical Commitments

George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality

BY PETER BRIAN BARRY



Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780197627402

https://academic.oup.com/book/46650


George Orwell is sometimes read as being disinterested in if not outright hostile to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell’s work reveals an author whose writing was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell said things of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive philosophical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of his corpus, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While he is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and to those philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality is the first monograph written by a philosopher that offers a reading of Orwell informed by historical and contemporary philosophy and promises to better our understanding of him and his work.


Peter Brian Barry is professor of philosophy and the Finkbeiner Endowed Professor in Ethics, Saginaw Valley State University.

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