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Orwell Vs Riis

Decent Essays

There are frequently distinct lines between journalism and fiction. However when we take a look at authors like Riis and Orwell we can see that the line was not always clearly drawn between then two. We can see distinct similarities between these two authors non-fiction works. Some of these similarities are the overly descript descriptions in the works, the titles that sound more like a short story then a non fiction essay, and the underlying political messages we find in these essays. Just looking at some of the titles to the these essays we can see political undertones start to appear. In Riis works we find titles like “Jewtown”, “The Working Girls of New York”, and “The Color Line in New York”, within Orwell’s work we find titles like …show more content…

(Orwell)
Both authors are clearly speaking about poverty, discrimination, and the social classes. One key thing that we can see in both of these passages is how they both take on a damn the man feeling. We see in Riis work he is speaking out against landlord who is treating the colors tenants poorly, and in Orwell’s we see his feelings of disgust against industrialism. Industrialism is something that was taking shape when both of these works were written. It also was a time period when many people found themselves struggling to survive on the poor pay they were getting in the factories. The unhappiness of the poorer class does seem to serve as inspiration for both of these works. We can also see the social realism come into play in both of these works, as well as their other works. However if we continue to focus on these two works we can see that both od these authors distinctly focused on the conditions of the poorer class. Which is a key element of social realism. By using social realism they also blurred the lines of fiction and

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