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This research explores the status of Orwell's text The Road to Wigan Pier. It is a subversive text due to the ambiguity of its status as a mixed genre. In fact, it is taught in England as literature though it is also categorized as documentary, journalism, fiction and non-fiction.It is challenging on both levels of form and content. The study, based on the structuralist approach, has revealed the author's challenge to the conventional novelistic parameters such as setting, characterization, and plot. Though not totally discarded, these parameters are manipulated by the author for his general purpose which is Socialism. Also, based on the cultural materialistic perspective, the study has shown the social ills of miners such as poverty and unemployment in the North of England during the 1930s and the cruel practices of Capitalism. While the first part of the text is a description of the author's journey to the north of England,the second part is a piece of polemic writing about Socialism as an alternative. So I have tried to strike a balance between two seemingly oppositional approaches in order to reveal the text's fictionality as well as its literariness and the author's creativity.
About the author
I am a teacher of English at The Preparatory Institute for Engineering Studies, Sfax, Tunisia. I have been teaching English for Science and Technology at university since 1996. My line of research is English literature (British novel). I received my MA in 2005 and now I am working on my doctoral thesis following the same line of research.
