This chapter argues that we should take seriously Orwell’s claim, in his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, that ‘what I  have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art’. By examining how this ambition of yoking art to politics plays out in Orwell’s final novel, it places Nineteen Eighty-Four within the context of the literary problems and practices of Orwell’s precursors and contemporaries. First, it considers his relationship with literary modernism and its legacies, with particular reference to his analysis of the work of James Joyce and Henry Miller, for instance in the 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’. Next, it examines Nineteen Eighty-Four in the light of earlier dystopian and speculative fiction by William Morris, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Jack London, Katharine Burdekin, Storm Jameson, and others; it also considers the influence on Orwell of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Finally, it assesses depictions of writing and the politics of language within the novel, and how their treatment might relate to Orwell’s sense of his place within twentieth-century literature.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, as even a glance at recent news articles suggests, is a text which we perennially feel the need to bring to bear upon our own circumstances. Rather than exploring the ways in which our circumstances align with those of Orwell’s novel, this chapter instead considers the complicity of stage, screen, and radio adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four in promoting a sense of its perpetual pertinence to the world today. Moving from a radio adaptation starring David Niven broadcast months after the novel’s publication to a ballet produced sixty years later, this chapter charts the changing contexts in which eleven adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been staged, arguing that various readings (and misreadings) are encouraged, both subtly and overtly, by adaptations with a commercial stake in securing the primacy and continued relevance of Orwell’s work. Following this line of thought, the chapter questions the elements of Orwell’s work which have secured its popularity, considering the changes and replications of adaptation as, respectively, mitigation for the ephemerality of Orwell’s satire and an exposure of his own ambivalent relationship to the qualities of popular fiction which he derides as ‘prolefeed’.

Traces of George Orwell’s critiques of totalitarian society, in both blunt and subtle forms, exist throughout video games. Major themes of dystopia, surveillance culture, technologies of control, authoritarianism, and the oppression of a large underclass exist in innumerable game narratives and environments. Do games like the BioShock series (2007– ), Remember Me (2013), Watch Dogs series (2014– ), We Happy Few (2018), Orwell (2016–), Inside (2016), and Papers, Please (2013) encourage critical thought around the eventuality of totalitarianism, of which Orwell warned? Or, are these games merely systems in which to practise a kind of entrapment, in which so-called ‘freedom’ may be performed within a medium that is exceedingly ordered in its very constitution? Through the stories games tell, as well as in the very form of video games, is it even possible to truly stimulate a model of criticality? This chapter proposes that the critical influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four exists not only in video game narratives and the constitution of their navigable spaces, but also in the wide variety of strategies, rule-based systems, rhetorical capacities, ethical problematics and – most importantly – their strategic kinds of failure.

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.

This chapter examines the posterity of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the comics medium. Drawing from adaptation theory, it examines a broad range of mainstream and alternative comic books, showing how they use, adapt, update, and sometimes reinvent Orwellian material, with strategies ranging from close rewriting (Ted Rall’s 2024) to intertextual reference (Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta with David Lloyd and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neil) and sometimes irreverential allusion (Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan). In so doing, comics writers and artists interrogate the cultural standing of comics and its ties to the literary canon, pointing to their own status as authors. They underline the pleasures of reading, viewing, and rewriting texts, and reflect upon the nature of fiction. They also use Orwellian themes of authoritarianism and control in order to reflect upon the history of the medium, looking at the superhero genre in particular. Finally, they address the specific issue of visibility and surveillance, which is of paramount importance in visual storytelling, and allows them to physically engage the reader in specific ways. Thus, these authors use their Orwellian intertext as the site of a politics of resistance to cultural hierarchies and political oppression.

The Dictionary of American Regional English is an historical dictionary of the regional and folk language of the United States. It is based on a wide range of sources, including a special project of nationwide fieldwork carried out from 1965–70. Special features are the extensive use of regional and social labelling, both of individual quotations and at the entry and sense level, and the inclusion of schematic maps based on the fieldwork. The dictionary was published by Harvard University Press in five volumes from 1985–2012, followed by a sixth volume of supplementary materials in 2013. Since the beginning of 2014 it has also been available in an online format embodying a corrected and enhanced version of the dictionary text, as well as a module that allows users to access the DARE survey data and to map selected responses. The online version is updated at intervals to incorporate new and revised entries.

This chapter explains the evolution of ‘hard-word’ dictionaries in English lexicography during the seventeenth century. Through a discussion of how lexicography and natural philosophy were emerging and how scientific methods were being applied to language, it traces the development of dictionaries and what kinds of information went into them. We see that the first monolingual dictionaries were lists of words; subsequently, those lists included short definitions of terms borrowed from other languages. Soon, dictionaries provided definitions of technical terms and jargon – the ‘hard words’ – and finally, dictionaries developed into encyclopedic reference works that added information on the history and development of the language and practical uses of a dictionary for words in general use. Last, the chapter details a famous case of lexicographical plagiarism to present how the concept of authorship has changed over time.

Gender and sexuality were crucial to Wagner’s Ring even before a note was written; his aesthetic theories for nascent music drama were gendered from the start, with text the male sperm that fertilizes music-as-woman. Wagner’s attitudes to gender were in many ways typical of his time, with active man situated above passive woman in the biological and social hierarchy. But his works are more complex and even found supporters among contemporary feminists. In fact, it is often his female characters who act, not the men, and it is the women who restore order when men trigger chaos. Wagner himself saw correlations between his sexual life and his work; we here examine instances of congruence and incongruence. We also consider how Wagner’s approach to sexuality in his works influenced the composers, writers and artists who came after him.

What is rhythm? I have not asked myself this question in a long time. Rhythm permeates my life as an ever-present flow of pulses, phrases, counting, and variation. Years of accumulated experience have furnished me with the sense that I know and understand it. Writing this chapter afforded me the opportunity to check in with composers who have deeply affected the way I think about rhythm. As I rummaged through their writings and works, I encountered a variety of perspectives that shook that sense of certainty and led me down multiple paths of inquiry.

It is not surprising that many discussions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Lied have centered on harmony and tonality; given its modest extent and relative textural simplicity, the Lied is eminently suitable for the exploration and explication of complex harmonic devices and unusual tonal techniques. The opportunity to connect harmony and tonality to text expression lends an additional attraction to the pitch-based analysis of Lieder. Many a classroom has been enlivened by discussions of a composer’s imaginative deployment of particular harmonic and tonal techniques to reflect or underline aspects of the given poetic text.

This essay describes the histories of the Middle English Dictionary (MED, completed in 2001) and the Dictionary of Old English (DOE, still in progress), their editorial procedures, and how each one has dealt with the problems facing it. For the MED, those problems included how to reconcile the fairly reliable dates of the manuscripts with the usually conjectural composition dates in the dating of illustrative quotations; how to distinguish the chronological dimension from the synchronic dimension and at the same time to distinguish the geographical/regional dimension from the chronological; and how to balance the original conception of a bilingual translation dictionary with the need to define as accurately as possible. For the DOE, those problems included how to develop a comprehensive electronic corpus of Old English texts, as well as to maintain and renew it; how to mark up the digital DOE to capture its deeply embedded information so that both Anglo-Saxon language and culture are accessible; how to connect outward to other relevant digital resources to enlarge DOE’s interpretative environment; and finally, how to balance the writing of definitions without claiming more knowledge than exists for this early material.

Richard Wagner was a political being throughout his life, even if his various political beliefs and commitments were not necessarily consistent or coherent. These beliefs found their way into his works. This is not surprising. Wagner despised what he saw as the shallowness and superficiality of contemporary opera. He aimed to supplant this with serious and substantial music dramas, of which the Ring is the grandest and most comprehensive example. Its mythological setting and characters can be deceptive. There are many implicit references to contemporary social and economic life. Wagner intended his work to have topical relevance. George Bernard Shaw, an early enthusiast for Wagner, was one of the first to see this. It is a mark of Wagner’s far-sightedness that he made an exploitative attitude to nature one of the key failings in the old order which was to be replaced. But how was this to happen? In his many drafts of Brunnhilde’s final peroration, Wagner evoked both the humanist Ludwig Feuerbach and the pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner’s interests were never narrowly musical. He took a keen interest in the philosophical and intellectual currents of his age.

Known as ‘the definitive record of the English language‘, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the largest dictionary of English in the world. This chapter traces its creation from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day - through the publication of the first edition, supplement volumes, second edition, and the current third edition and OED Online website. The lexicograhic policies and practices of the various editors are also discussed, e.g. from Herbert Coleridge, Frederick Furnivall, and James Murray to Henry Bradley, Charles Onions, William Craigie, Robet Burchfield, John Simpson, Ed Weiner, and Michael Proffitt. This chapter also discusses the OED‘s current efforts to move from seeing the dictionary as a discrete text to seeing the dictionary as data which can be used in machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.

In keeping with its character as evasive and subversive language, slang is hard to define. Some see it as urban masculine vocabulary focused on sex, intoxication, and excretion; others as instrumentally valuable in the construction of in- and out-groups, or as a matter of style to facilitate fitting in and standing out. This chapter traces the history of slang dictionaries from the first slang dictionary of 1699, written by the semi-anonymous ‘B. E.’, to the work of other slang lexicographers throughout the centuries: Francis Grose, John Camden Hotten, John Stephen Farmer, William Ernest Henley, Eric Partridge, Jonathan Lighter, and Jonathan Green.