ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the making and claiming of a reputation, rather than to argue a specific case for its upward or downward revaluation. One of the most difficult problems for literary and cultural historians is to cast light on the making of reputation as a social process while not ignoring that intrinsic, sometimes indefinable, aesthetic attributes of works contribute to authors' reputations. Literary histories have traditionally nourished the illusions by treating the rise and fall of reputations as a matter of "taste," a subject best left to the curious sociologist and the omniscient "verdict of posterity," outside the bounds of literary scholarship proper. The subject of George Orwell's reputation raises all the issues with the man and writer's characteristic directness.
