David Dwan – författare

George Orwell is watching you and you're watching him. Britain pays its respects in the form of the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Lecture, and, more recently, Orwell Day. A statue of Orwell now stands outside Broadcasting House in London and he continues to tower over broadsheet journalism. His ghost is repeatedly summoned in the houses of Parliament and in schools across Britain. In Europe and the US, citizens confront the perennial question: "What would Orwell say?" Orwell is part of the political vocabulary of our times, yet partly due to this popularity, what he stands for remains opaque. His writing confirms deep and widely shared intuitions about political justice, but much of its enduring fascination derives from the fact that these intuitions don't quite add up. David Dwan accounts for these inconsistencies by exploring the broader moral conflict at the centre of Orwell's work and the troubled idealism it yields. Examining the whole sweep of Orwell's writings, this book shows how literature can be a rich source of political wisdom.

'The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.'When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.Animal Farm was one of George Orwell's most successful books - after its publication Orwell became one of the best-paid writers in England. Though the text continues to play a foundational role in the political education of young people across the world, its allegorical function has become more difficult to decode as the U.S.S.R recedes into the historical distance.

Edmund Burke prided himself on being a practical statesman, not an armchair philosopher. Yet his responses to specific problems - rebellion in America, the abuse of power in India and Ireland, or revolution in France - incorporated theoretical debates within jurisprudence, economics, religion, moral philosophy and political science. Moreover, the extraordinary rhetorical force of Burke's speeches and writings quickly secured his reputation as a gifted orator and literary stylist. This Companion provides a comprehensive assessment of Burke's thought, exploring all his major writings from his early treatise on aesthetics to his famous polemic, Reflections on the Revolution in France. It also examines the vexed question of Burke's Irishness and seeks to determine how his cultural origins may have influenced his political views. Finally, it aims both to explain and to challenge interpretations of Burke as a romantic, a utilitarian, a natural law thinker and founding father of modern conservatism.

How novels attune us to the broader role of fiction in our lives—our everyday yet remarkable ability to think and live “as if” Why do we weep at fictitious things? How do we act on the basis of them? How much of moral life revolves around make-believe? In The Good Life and Other Fictions, David Dwan shows how literary fictions confront us with the wider role of fictiveness in our lives—the storied character we give to experience, our reliance on ideation, idealization and metaphor, the ways we depend on ideas that we know to be untrue or are only true because we choose to believe in them. In an age of fake news and fake antifakery, Dwan argues that we need a more differentiated sense of the fictive. Fiction is not necessarily fraud, nor is it simply error and unreality. Indeed, it is often the source of what’s best about us—the space in which the good life is imagined and talked into being.Drawing on over a century of literary fiction—and offering detailed studies of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis and Iris Murdoch—Dwan investigates different facets of fictional experience, from imaginative projection to wishful thinking to self-deception to lies. Novels, he contends, both express and expose the ways we see through illusion, spending much of our time in a twilight state between reality and unreality, credulity and doubt, assent and dissent. Interrogating the benefits and limits of a fictive attitude—our deep yet dangerous need to operate “as if”—Dwan makes a highly original contribution to the field of ethical criticism, and to our general understanding of how life is made livable through fiction.

Edmund Burke prided himself on being a practical statesman, not an armchair philosopher. Yet his responses to specific problems - rebellion in America, the abuse of power in India and Ireland, or revolution in France - incorporated theoretical debates within jurisprudence, economics, religion, moral philosophy and political science. Moreover, the extraordinary rhetorical force of Burke's speeches and writings quickly secured his reputation as a gifted orator and literary stylist. This Companion provides a comprehensive assessment of Burke's thought, exploring all his major writings from his early treatise on aesthetics to his famous polemic, Reflections on the Revolution in France. It also examines the vexed question of Burke's Irishness and seeks to determine how his cultural origins may have influenced his political views. Finally, it aims both to explain and to challenge interpretations of Burke as a romantic, a utilitarian, a natural law thinker and founding father of modern conservatism.