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Homage to Catalonia

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Homage to Catalonia
Type
Memoir
Language
English
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Wikipedia

Homage to Catalonia is a 1938 memoir by English writer George Orwell, in which he accounts his personal experiences and observations while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, Orwell recounts Catalonia's revolutionary fervor during his training in Barcelona, his boredom on the front lines in Aragon, his involvement in the interfactional May Days conflict back in Barcelona on leave, his getting shot in the throat back on the front lines, and his escape to France after the POUM was declared an illegal organization. The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."

Initial reception was mixed, often depending on whether the reviewers' analyses of events aligned with Orwell's. Praise was reserved for his vivid depiction of life on the frontlines, while criticisms were aimed at his denunciations of the Republican government and Communist Party. It received a second wave of popularity during the 1950s, after the popularity of Orwell's novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) attracted a reevaluation of the book, with American liberal intellectuals presenting it as a work of anti-communism. During the 1960s, figures in the New Left again recontextualised it through the lens of revolutionary socialism, opposed both to Marxism-Leninism and capitalism, which attracted another wave of criticism from figures in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Since the Spanish transition to democracy, it has received a reevaluation by historians in debates about its quality as a primary source, with British historian Tom Buchanan noting its limited, unbalanced viewpoint and cautioning against reading it as a representation of the conflict as a whole.

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Annotation

Memoir first published on April 25, 1938. The book is a personal account of Orwell's experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War.

Last modified: 2020-08-13 (revision #20889)

Editions

NameFormatISBNRelease Date
Homage to Catalonia and Looking back on the Spanish WarPaperback01400169961966
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Identifiers

LibraryThing Work
11826
OpenLibrary Work ID
OL1168169W
Wikidata Work ID
Q514694

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Last Modified
2024-06-29