Citrus High School: Honors English Ii: Summer Reading (Page 2 of 3) in pdf

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Citrus High School: English II: Summer Reading

Historical and Literary Context

: 1944-45

HEN

RITTEN

: England

HERE

RITTEN

: 1945

HEN

UBLISHED

: Modernism

ITERARY

ERIOD

: Orwell subtitled Animal Farm “A Fairy Story.” Characters in fairy tales tend

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to be two-dimensional stereotypes used to reveal some broad observation about life. As the critic C.M.

Wodehouse wrote in a piece on Animal Farm in 1954, a fairy tale has no moral. It simply says, “Life is

like that—take it or leave it.” Animal Farm uses the format of a fairy tale to expose the evils of

totalitarian exploitation. Rather than attack totalitarianism directly, the book shows its offenses plainly

and clearly and lets the reader deduce the dangers posed by totalitarian governments. The literary

work most often mentioned alongside Animal Farm is 1984, another Orwell novel. 1984, published in

1949, envisions a future in which a dictatorship monitors and controls the actions of all of its citizens.

Like Animal Farm, 1984 depicted the horrific constraints that totalitarian governments could impose

on human freedom.

: In 1917, two successive revolutions rocked Russia and the world. The

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first revolution overthrew the Russian Monarchy (the Tsar) and the second established the USSR, the

world’s first Communist state. Over the next thirty years the Soviet government descended into a

totalitarian regime that used and manipulated socialist ideas of equality among the working class to

oppress its people and maintain power. Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian Revolution and the

Communist Soviet Union. Many of the animal characters in Animal Farm have direct correlations to

figures or institutions in the Soviet Union.

Choose One Only

1. Discuss Napoleon as an example of someone corrupted by power.

2. Compare Snowball and Napoleon as leaders. What qualities do they share or not share? Discuss.

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Citrus High School: Honors English Ii: Summer Reading Page 2

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