George Orwell and Spain : the birth of a political writer

Abstract

George Orwell travelled to Spain for six months between 1936 and 1937. Here, while taking in the fight against Fascism, Orwell soon realised that he all was not as it seemed on Republican side. The pervasive censorship and propagation of pure lies trouble Orwell greatly, and this can be seen through the writing which followed his stay in Spain. The aim of this dissertation is to show how deeply Orwell was affected and how he used his experience of the Spanish Civil War and the political problems around it as material for some of his later work. The non-fiction Homage to Catalonia reads like a day-to-day journal of trench warfare, but exposes much of what was happening politically at the time in Spain and what was being covered up by both the local and foreign press. His later works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four draw on what was going on in totalitarian regimes that were present at the time and act as a warning of the possible evil to come. Chapter one focuses on Orwell's early beginnings, is a brief insight into the early works and experiences of the writer and the beginning of Orwell's political consciousness. The following chapter deals with Orwell's experience in Spain and chapter three discusses how concerned Orwell was with the manipulation of truth by the media. The final chapter shows how Orwell implemented what he had seen acted out in the war in his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.