Nineteen Eighty-Four
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
1. Primary Texts: Narrative Prose
George
Orwell. Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
Supporting References:
- Birch, Dinah. "Nineteen Eighty‐Four." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Nineteen
Eighty‐Four. A novel by George
*Orwell, published 1949; a dystopian story of
totalitarianism of the future and one man's hopeless struggle against
it. Winston Smith, the hero, has no heroic qualities, only a wistful
longing for truth and decency. But in a social system where there is
no privacy and where having unorthodox ideas incurs the death penalty
he knows he has no hope. His brief love affair ends in arrest by the
Thought Police, and when, after months of torture and brainwashing,
he is released, he makes his final submission of his own accord. The
book is a warning of the possibilities of the police state brought to
perfection, where power is the only thing that counts, where the past
is constantly being modified to fit the present, where the official
language, ‘Newspeak’, progressively narrows the range of ideas
and independent thought, and where Doublethink becomes a necessary
habit of mind. It is a society dominated by slogans—‘War is
Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength’—and controlled
by compulsory worship of the head of the Party, Big Brother. The
novel had an extraordinary impact, and many of its phrases and
coinages (including its title) passed into the common language,
although the precise implications of Orwell's warning (and it was a
warning, rather than a prophecy) have been subjected to many
different political interpretations.”
- Birch, Dinah. "Orwell, George." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Orwell and less a discussion on the above-cited text.
“Orwell, George (1903–50) Pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair,
novelist and political writer, born in Bengal, India, brought to
England when he was 3, and educated at St Cyprian's prep school (of
which his account, ‘Such, such were the joys’, was considered too
libellous to print in this country until 1968) and at Eton College.
He went on to serve with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, 1922–7;
his uneasy experiences as a policeman are reflected in his first
novel, Burmese Days (1934), and in two of his finest essays,
‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’. He resigned ‘to
escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's
dominion over man’, as he later put it, and then worked in Paris
and London in a series of ill‐paid jobs and lived off and on among
tramps (see Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933, his
first published book), struggling all the while with the repeated
rejection of his work by publishers. His second novel, A
Clergyman's Daughter (1935), describes the adventures of Dorothy
Hare, who through loss of memory briefly escapes from the confines of
her life to join the vagrants and hop‐pickers of Kent. Keep the
Aspidistra Flying (1936), which he wrote while working in a
Hampstead bookshop, recounts the literary aspirations and financial
humiliations of Gordon Comstock, a bookseller's assistant. A journey
north in 1936, commissioned by Victor
*Gollancz, produced his vivid and opinionated
account of unemployment, proletarian life, and his fellow socialist
intellectuals, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937, published by
the Left
Book Club). The Spanish Civil War (in which he
fought for the Republicans and was wounded) intensified his political
preoccupations, honed his style, and resulted in Homage to
Catalonia (1938). Orwell's simmering disgust with modernity and
the threat of imminent war hung over his next novel, Coming up
for Air (1939), which focuses on the many frustrations of George
Bowling, a modern everyman, and his yearning for the lost England of
his (and Orwell's) youth. By this stage Orwell saw himself primarily
as a political writer, a democratic socialist who avoided party
labels, hated totalitarianism, and was to become more and more
disillusioned with the methods of communism. V.
S. *Pritchett, reviewing Orwell's The Lion
and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941),
compared him to Daniel
*Defoe and William
*Cobbett both for his ‘subversive,
non‐conforming brand of patriotism’ and for his ‘lucid
conversational style’. His collections of essays include Inside
the Whale (1940), Critical Essays (1946), and Shooting
an Elephant (1950). But his most popular works were and remain
his political satires Animal
Farm (1945) and Nineteen
Eighty‐Four (1949). His first wife, Eileen,
died in 1945, and he married Sonia Mary Brownell in 1949, shortly
before his death from tuberculosis, an illness from which he had
suffered for many years. His Complete Works (20 vols, ed.
Peter Davison) appeared in 1998. See Bernard Crick, George Orwell:
A Life (rev. edn, 1992); Michael Sheldon, Orwell: The
Authorised Biography (1991).”
- a
- a
- a
Comments