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George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature (5233 words) |
 | In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about "petty-bourgeois individualism," "the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism," etc., and backed up by words of abuse such as "romantic" and "sentimental," which, since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. |
| Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. |
| Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered during a thousand years. |
| James T. Farrell: American Literature Marches On (1946) (4716 words) |
| One way of interpreting literature is by describing it as an imaginative trial of the consciousness of man. In imaginative representation and re-creation, man goes through the trial of his times, the trial of his past and his present, and in doing this, he anticipates his future as best he can. |
| We see suggestions of this in Russian literature, in the succession of characters who are described in such convincing human terms, and who modelled or tried to model their lives, for good or for ill, on a philosophy, a set of ideas. |
| The major theme of Russian literature of the nineteenth century is a moral one that of revealing in various ways the effort of men to find consistency between their ideals and their actions. |
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