The Duty to Stand Aside: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort
(eBook)

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Hoopla Extract Information

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(
    [year] => 2018
    [artist] => Eric Laursen
    [fiction] => 
    [coverImageUrl] => https://cover.hoopladigital.com/csp_9781849353175_270.jpeg
    [titleId] => 12061932
    [isbn] => 9781849353175
    [abridged] => 
    [language] => ENGLISH
    [profanity] => 
    [title] => The Duty to Stand Aside
    [demo] => 
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    [pages] => 180
    [children] => 
    [artists] => Array
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            [0] => stdClass Object
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                    [name] => Eric Laursen
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    [genres] => Array
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            [0] => Anarchism
            [1] => Europe
            [2] => Great Britain - 20th Century
            [3] => History
            [4] => Political Ideologies
            [5] => Political Science
            [6] => Social History
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    [price] => 1.69
    [id] => 12061932
    [edited] => 
    [kind] => EBOOK
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    [upc] => 
    [synopsis] => The Duty to Stand Aside tells the story of one of the most intriguing yet little-known literary-political feuds-and friendships-in 20th-century English literature. It examines the arguments that divided George Orwell, future author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Alex Comfort, poet, biologist, anarchist-pacifist, and future author of the international bestseller The Joy of Sex-during WWII. Orwell maintained that standing aside, or opposing Britain's war against fascism, was "objectively pro-fascist." Comfort argued that intellectuals who did not stand aside and denounce their own government's atrocities-in Britain's case, saturation bombing of civilian population centers-had "sacrificed their responsible attitude to humanity." Later, Comfort and Orwell developed a friendship based on appreciation of each other's work and a common concern about the growing power and penetration of the State-a concern that deeply influenced the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shortly before his death in 1950, however, Orwell would accuse Comfort of being "anti-British" and "temperamentally pro-totalitarian" in a memo he prepared secretly for the Foreign Office-a fact that Comfort, who died in 2000, never knew. Laursen's book takes a fresh look at the Orwell-Comfort quarrel and the lessons it holds for our very different world-in which war has been replaced by undeclared "conflicts," civilian bombing is even more enthusiastically practiced, and moral choices between two sides are rarely straightforward.
    [url] => https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12061932
    [pa] => 
    [subtitle] => Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort
    [publisher] => AK Press
    [purchaseModel] => INSTANT
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