The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four

Description

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) remains a book of the moment. This Companion builds on successive waves of generational inheritance and debate in the novel's reception by asking new questions about how and why Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, what it means, and why it matters. Chapters on a selection of the novel's interpretative contexts, the literary histories from which it is inseparable, the urgent questions it raises, and the impact it has had on other kinds of media, ranging from radio to video games, open up the conversation in an expansive way. Established concerns (e.g. Orwell's attitude to the working class, his anxieties about the socio-political compartmentalization of the post-war world) are presented alongside newer ones (e.g. his views on evil, and the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on comics). Individual essays help us see in new ways how Orwell's most famous work continues to be a novel for our times.

Nathan Waddell is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (2019), Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900-1920 ( 2012), and Modern John Buchan: A Critical Introduction (2009). He has also co-edited volumes of essays on the work of Wyndham Lewis.