| 翻訳と辞書 |
| Coming Up for Air ： ウィキペディア英語版 |
Coming Up for Air
''Coming Up for Air'' is a novel by George Orwell, first published in June 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. It combines premonitions of the impending war with images of an idyllic Thames-side Edwardian era childhood. The novel is pessimistic, with its view that speculative builders, commercialism and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, "everything cemented over", and there are great new external threats.
==Background==
As a child, Orwell lived at Shiplake and Henley in the Thames Valley. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a civil servant in British India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and later at Eton in Britain. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family.〔Jacintha Buddicom ''Eric & Us'' Chatto & Windus 1971〕
In 1937 Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded in the throat in May 1937, by a Fascist sniper at Huesca.〔Facing Unpleasant Facts, S&W, 1998, p.xxix〕
Orwell was severely ill in 1938 and was advised to spend the winter in a warm climate. The novelist L. H. Myers anonymously gave £300 to enable this and Orwell went with his wife to North Africa where he stayed, in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh, from September 1938 to March 1939. (Orwell never learned the source of the money and he accepted it only on condition that it be considered a loan. He repaid the loan, eight years later, when he began making money from the success of ''Animal Farm''.)〔Michael Shelden, ''Orwell'', p.324〕 Orwell wrote ''Coming Up for Air'' while he was in North Africa〔''Coming Up for Air'', "A Note on the Text", Peter Davison, page v. (Penguin Classics ISBN 978-0-14-118569-9)〕 and left the manuscript at his agent's office within a few hours of arriving back in England on 30 March 1939. It was submitted to Victor Gollancz, who had an option on Orwell's next three novels, in spite of the 'cold treatment which () had been given when ''Homage to Catalonia'' was rejected.' In fact Orwell heard in April 1939 that Gollancz had reservations about the book, and was delaying a decision to accept it. The descriptions in the novel of a character who lectures at a meeting of Gollancz's Left Book Club, and of the meeting itself, were such that Gollancz 'could not have helped being offended by them.'〔Michael Shelden, Orwell, p.336〕 Nevertheless, the publisher did bring out the novel without demanding major changes and it was published on 12 June 1939. It was the last Orwell novel to bear the Gollancz imprint.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
■ウィキペディアで「Coming Up for Air」の詳細全文を読む
スポンサード リンク
| 翻訳と辞書 : 翻訳のためのインターネットリソース |
Copyright(C) kotoba.ne.jp 1997-2016. All Rights Reserved.
|
|