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"Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success."
Disgusted by society's materialism, Gordon Comstock leaves his job in advertising to pursue an ill-fated career as a poet. In his race to the bottom, only Rosemary, his long-suffering girlfriend, challenges Gordon's self-destructive course. The novel contains the most sustained reflections on the role of the author and the artistic imagination anywhere in Orwell's fiction, as the book's protagonist struggles (and ultimately fails) to reconcile his romantic-aestheticist sensibilities with the pressures of the literary marketplace and with social expectations. Completed while Orwell travelled north to work on The Road to Wigan Pier, this novel is a key transitional text in his career. Offering a powerful portrayal of the emotional toll of precarity and the desire to break with capitalism, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a significant work of mid-century British fiction but it also speaks to our own time.
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List of contents
- Introduction
- Notes on the Text
- Select Bibliography
- A Chronology of George Orwell
- Keep the Aspidistra Flying
- Explanatory Notes
About the author
Benjamin Kohlmann teaches English literature at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He is the author of Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (2014) and Speculative States: Literature and Reform in Britain, 1870-1920 (forthcoming). His articles have been published in PMLA, ELH, Novel, and other journals. He has co-edited several essay collections, including A History of 1930s British Literature (2019), with Matthew Taunton.
Summary
"Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success." Gordon Comstock decides to live in poverty rather than compromise with the 'money god'. Disgusted by society's materialism, he leaves his job in advertising to pursue an ill-fated career as a poet.
