‘Awake! oh you young men of England’ The Construction of National Identity in Orwell’s Essays and Novels

Abstract

From the huge corpus of Orwell’s literary production, two aspects clearly emerge: together with a highly distinctive style, a wide range of examined subjects. The thesis, which is divided in five chapters, is concerned with one of the writer’s most burning interests: the constituent characters of English identity. After an introductory part, in which the process of formation of Englishness is briefly depicted, numerous Orwell’s writings are analysed in detail. In the second chapter, the attention is focused on education, whose unflattering description is contained in one of Orwell’s most virulent essays, ‘Such, such Were the Joys’, and on the English language, a matter which always had the uttermost importance for the writer, also for its political implications. In the following chapter, another fundamental element for the construction of English identity, the British Empire, is scrutinized through impressive Orwell’s books, such as Burmese Days and The Road to Wigan Pier. In those works, the author pointed out the effects of the despotic system of the empire on the English themselves. The fourth chapter is entirely dedicated to Orwell’s accurate analysis of a strong pillar of English identity, that is, social classes, while in the final part of the thesis, why Orwell and his works are still topical is explained.