George Orwell, a political conscience of the XXth century

This George Orwell conference will look at George Orwell's intellectual legacy. While the list is not exhaustive, suggestions for papers dealing with any of the following themes will be welcome:

• Orwell's view of colonialism, and of the totalitarian states in the 1930s
• The threat of war, in the 1930s and post-1945 (the nuclear peril)
• The conditions under which a decent society may emerge and Orwell's concept of 'common decency'
• The evolution of class consciousness and class thinking in Britain
• English (and British) national identity, the North-South divide
• Orwell's view of industrial horror and the ecological conclusions this awareness elicits
• Orwell's work on the language of the Establishment, on political propaganda as a potent instrument to manipulate the masses
• Orwel's distrust of the very concept of the 'intellectual', which is at a remove from 'the ordinary man' whom he praises; the connections between this and his reconciliation of freedom and socialism; the move away from ideological dogmatism
• How Orwell has been read, or instrumentalised, in history: from the 'American reading'of Orwell 'exclusively anti-communist' to the Commonwealth reading (where the anti-colonial dimension prevails); from Eastern European countries (he was translated into Polish and Ukrainian at an early stage) to the way some British conservatives (John Major) have tried to use Orwell.
• Lastly, how Orwell has been read by other writers (Philip Larkin, Anthony Burgess...).