Beşliu Maria, 2nd year, Group 2, English A – German B Victorian Literature, Seminar Tutor: Eliana Ionoaia

IDEOLOGY IN JOHN OSBORNE’S “LOOK BACK IN ANGER”

Presentation Handout

I. The critical approach: Walter Benjamin and Terry Eagleton’s concepts of

literature and ideology
II. The historical and political context
- a post-Second World War Britain
- the collapse of the British Empire
- a new type of universities (“red-brick universities”) vs. the Oxbridge model
- the Beveridge Plan – the attempt to create a Welfare State
- Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal
- people’s disappointment with the state’s promises
III. Osborne’s post-war generation
- the discrimination of the working-class
- the young generation’s struggle to find its social identity
- Osborne’s personal response
IV. Jimmy and his attacks, his quest for identity
V. Jimmy and Colonel Redfern – the ideology behind
VI. Jimmy – a Hamlet of his time and a representative of his generation
VII. Conclusion

“Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is, with special emphasis on the non-U
intelligentsia who live in bedsitters and divide the Sunday newspapers into two groups, “posh” and “wet”.
(…) I agree that Look Back in Anger is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters however is the size
of the minority. I estimate it at roughly 6 733 000, which is the number of people in this country between
the ages of twenty and thirty.” (Kenneth Tynan)

Jimmy represents “the dismay of many young Britons whose childhood and adolescence were
scarred by the depression and the war; who came of age under a Socialist Government, yet
found, when they went out into the world, that the class system was still mysteriously intact. On
the other hand he reflected the much wider problem of what to do with a liberal education in a
technological world” (Kenneth Tynan).