Explore the tradition of the political essay with this brilliant anthology. David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history—revolution and war, racism, women’s rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and nonviolence, among them—and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, along with a wide-ranging introduction.

Writing matters: it plays a key role in the circulation of ideas in society and has a direct impact on the development of democracy. But only a few get to do the kind of writing that most influence this development. The Politics of Writing examines writing as a social practice. The authors draw on critical linguistics, cultural studies and literacy studies, as they explore and analyse: * the social context in which writing is embedded * the processes and practices of writing * the purposes of writing * the reader-writer relationship * issues of writer identity. They challenge current notions of 'correctness' and argue for a more democratic pedagogy as part of the answer to the inequitable distribution of the right to write.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Writing Politics is a methods book designed to instruct on politically focused literary inquiry through a series of violence-themed inquiries that emphasize forms of writing as the vehicles for politically attuned historiography.

Brand new collection of the essential essays from one of the founders of cultural studies, Raymond Williams Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of cultural and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of which are published for the first time, Williams emerges as not only one of the great writers of materialist criticism, but also a thoroughly engaged political writer. Published to coincide with the centenary of his birth and showing the full range of his work, from his early writings on the novel and society, to later work on ecosocialism and the politics of modernism, Politics and Culture shows Williams at both his most accessible and his most penetrating.An essential book for all those interested in the politics of culture in the twentieth century, and the development of Williams's work.

Arguably Conor Cruise O'Brien's most influential and admired book was this brilliant collection of essays - on history, literature and public affairs - first published in 1965. 'I can still remember the excitement with which I discovered a copy of Writers and Politics, in a provincial library in Devonshire thirty years ago. Nobody who tries to write about either of those subjects, or about "the bloody crossroads" where they have so often met, can disown a debt to the Cruiser.' Christopher Hitchens, London Review of Books 'When a liberal can write such pieces as "Mercy and Mercenaries", "Journal de Combat", "Varieties of Anti-Communism", "A New Yorker Critic", and "Generation of Saints", an important voice has returned to our culture.' Raymond Williams, Guardian

Beginning in the 1980s, a number of popular and influential anthologies organized around themes of shared identity—Nice Jewish Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, Home Girls, and others—have brought together women’s fiction and poetry with journal entries, personal narratives, and transcribed conversations. These groundbreaking multi-genre anthologies, Cynthia G. Franklin demonstrates, have played a crucial role in shaping current literary studies, in defining cultural and political movements, and in building connections between academic and other communities. Exploring intersections and alliances across the often competing categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Writing Women’s Communities contributes to current public debates about multiculturalism, feminism, identity politics, the academy as a site of political activism, and the relationship between literature and politics.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Politics and the English Language, the second in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell takes aim at the language used in politics, which, he says, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. In an age where the language used in politics is constantly under the microscope, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is just as relevant today, and gives the reader a vital understanding of the tactics at play. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Roman literature is inherently political in the varied contexts of its production and the abiding concerns of its subject matter. This collection examines the strategies and techniques of political writing at Rome in a broad range of literature spanning almost two centuries, differing political systems, climates, and contexts. It applies a definition of politics that is more in keeping with modern critical approaches than has often been the case in studies of the political literature of classical antiquity. By applying a wide variety of critically informed viewpoints, this volume offers the reader not only a long view of the abiding techniques, strategies, and concerns of political expression at Rome but also many new perspectives on individual authors of the early empire and their republican precursors.

Essays on politics and literature from one of world literature's most respected voices. 'The bravest and most clear-headed interpreter of the Israeli-Palestinian divide' Observer 'The most honest, soul-searching book yet written by an Israeli - or, for that matter, by a Palestinian - on an agony that neither of them alone can bring to an end' L.A. Times Throughout his career, David Grossman has been a voice for peace and reconciliation between Israel and its Arab citizens and neighbours. In five new essays on politics and literature in Israel today, he addresses the conscience of a country that has lost faith in its leaders and its ideals. This collection includes an already-famous speech that Grossman delivered in the presence of Ehud Olmert, attacking Olmert's policies and his prosecution of Israel's disastrous Lebanon war in 2006, the war that took the life of Grossman's 20-year-old son Uri. Moving, humane, clear-sighted, and courageous, these essays on literature and the Holocaust, and artistic creation as well as politics and philosophy are a cri de coeur from a calm voice of reason at a time of uncertainty and despair.