Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four
- The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- 1 Teaching and Learning in and beyond Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 2 The Virtual Geographies of Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 3 The Politics of the Archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 4 Orwell and Humanism
- Part II Histories
- Part III Questions
- Part IV Media
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
2 - The Virtual Geographies of Nineteen Eighty-Four
from Part I - Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020
- The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four
- The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- 1 Teaching and Learning in and beyond Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 2 The Virtual Geographies of Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 3 The Politics of the Archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 4 Orwell and Humanism
- Part II Histories
- Part III Questions
- Part IV Media
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
Summary
Every novel creates its own map, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has at least two. One is the geopolitical map of the world, on which the warring forces of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are locked in an unending struggle for dominance. The other is the geography of social interaction, private space, and psychological interiority located in the perceptions and the mind of Orwell’s anti-hero, Winston Smith. Each has its own language, the geopolitical map being described in journalistic and strategic language, the private domain in the familiar novelistic discourse of private life. Orwell said Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspired by the Teheran conference of 1943, in which the leaders of the Allied powers discussed dividing the post-war world up between them. But he also wrote a novel about the fate of a private citizen in an imagined age of totalitarian surveillance, desperately seeking sanctuary spaces in which to take refuge from an all-seeing regime. This essay describes the global and the personal geography of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and seeks to show how these map on to each other, how brutal power seeks absolute control of both, and how each nonetheless retains a fragile space for resistance and hope.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four , pp. 37 - 50Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020