Nineteen Eighty-Four does not seem to offer the most promising material for singers, rock stars, and opera performers. There is, nevertheless, a vast history of adaptation and appropriation of Orwell’s text, a sub-genre referred to here as ‘rock’n’prole’. This afterlife in music encompasses a wide range of forms and styles, from albums such as David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974), Rage Against The Machine’s The Battle Of Los Angeles (1999), and Muse’s The Resistance (2009) to individual songs such as John Lennon’s ‘Only People’ (1973) and Radiohead’s ‘2+2=5’ (2003). There is also the controversial opera 1984 (2005), composed by Lorin Maazel, which demonstrates yet another vector for musical response to Orwellian dystopia. This chapter traces the history of these responses to Nineteen Eighty-Four in order to consider how musical adaptation brings into focus a key tension in dystopia more generally: that between entertainment and instruction. Does the act of taking Orwell’s novel as source material strip it of its critical content, once transmuted into song? Or does the act of adaptation reveal and make possible new kinds of criticism, aided and abetted by the confluence of text and music?

This chapter asks why Orwell’s novel is so often referred to as a satire even though it lacks, for the most part, the humour that is commonly associated with that mode. It begins by locating Orwell in the ancient tradition of Juvenalian satire, in which moral indignation rather than amusement predominates. It then turns to the more specific tradition of utopian and dystopian satire, in which fictional words are constructed in order to offer a contrast to, or exaggeration of, the present society, with the aim of critiquing existing social and political trends. Laying out a history of dystopia, it examines key works in this tradition – from Thomas More’s Utopia and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels through more recent texts by H. G. Wells, Jack London, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and others – and their importance as precursors to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Finally, it examines Orwell’s own satiric technique in the novel, both his subtle methods of comic ridicule (generally directed at British apologists for Stalinism) and his more direct attacks on totalitarianism proper, which are woven into the setting and the action of the novel.

This chapter puts Nineteen Eighty-Four in conversation with a literary predecessor who energized Orwell at the very root, H. G. Wells. Considering these two figures side by side, ‘Wells, Orwell, and the Dictator’ thinks, first, about how powerfully Wells had influenced Orwell and, equally, how deeply entangled the two writers were in their consideration of issues around freedom, the state, the individual, and the future. Even if they end up on opposite sides of the spectrum – Wells, a utopian who believed that a united world could leave humanity free, peaceful, and prosperous, and Orwell, an anti-utopian who saw in the trends of the twentieth century an image of humans obliterated by the mechanisms of power – the two share a set of preoccupations about power and the future that motivated their fiction and left a mark on the imaginative life of the twentieth century.

We live in Orwellian times. We have also lived through, and continue to live in, an age of post-Orwellian novels. Books by writers as varied as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Anthony Burgess, Philip K. Dick, Cory Doctorow, Dave Eggers, Maggie Gee, Ursula Le Guin, Michel Houellebecq, and Will Self, not to mention Suzanne Collins, Patrick Ness, and Veronica Roth, among numerous others, attest to the influence Nineteen Eighty-Four has exerted, and still exerts, on the literary imagination. This chapter considers the creative legacy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, looking at how writers have appropriated and adapted the literary form of Orwell’s text, and how they have responded to its visions of surveillance, state power, and erasure of identity. This chapter thus considers the status Orwell’s novel holds in the twenty-first century as a formative influence on the dystopian genre and as a text that continues to shape the way in which authors address the anxieties of their own times.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel about being dirty and dirtied. This chapter shows how the representations of things like mess and dirt and associated feelings like nausea, disgust, and squeamishness are bound up in revealing ways with Orwell’s depictions of the differences between totalitarian rulers and the subjects they rule. Moving in sequence through considerations of how Orwell gives filth, nausea, and disgust interesting things to do in the novel, the chapter traces a pattern of symbolic relations which culminates in the differences between the apparent cleanliness of Oceania’s political systems and the nigh-on inescapable muck of its citizens, and of the spaces they inhabit. The puritanism of Ingsoc accepts the reality of dirt, seeks to annihilate the sex instinct, and is temperamentally opposed to the aesthetic. In tracing that puritanism, Orwell made a narrative virtue of squalor. Coursing through Nineteen Eighty-Four, in other words, is a pattern of relations to do with the political work of filth and the ideological consequences of its avoidance (or apparent avoidance). This actualizing of squalor enabled Orwell to create a perennially applicable literary dystopia. It also helped him think through the complexities and inconsistencies of a politics built on the logics of filth.

This essay reads Nineteen Eighty-Four in the historical context of the refugee crises that occurred during the early twentieth century and argues that the novel explores how ethical compassion towards the plight of refugees might be cultivated. In the totalitarian state of Oceania, regimes of racist nationalism and economic scarcity are enforced in order to scapegoat foreigners as threats, as Orwell draws attention to political systems responsible for fostering hostility towards outsiders and strangers. In doing so, Nineteen Eighty-Four suggests that compassionate and sympathetic responses to the spectacle of refugee suffering are neither innate nor pre-given in human beings, but are instead shaped by the socio-political systems we inhabit. Nineteen Eighty-Four thus remains highly relevant to the migration crises that are still very much part of our contemporary moment.

The chapter draws on The Lion and the Unicorn to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four, like ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, represents a shift in Orwell’s thought as he critiques a meritocratic social order in a depiction of a dystopian society ordered around intellectual ability. The chapter examines intellectual control in Oceania through two processes: firstly, ‘doublethink’, a process through which the most intelligent members of society must submit themselves more completely to an act of self-hypnosis and secondly, the chapter contextualizes Ingsoc’s slogans against Animal Farm to argue that Orwell identifies political slogans with mind control. The chapter argues that the novel is Winston Smith’s thwarted bildungsroman, analysing how its form is designed to interrogate Ingsoc’s slogans. It examines the scenes of Winston’s self-education as he reads Goldstein’s Book and the children’s history textbook and suggests how the novel’s torture scene is aligned with the pedagogic, as the pupil/teacher relationship is redefined by Orwell as a relationship based upon intellectual manipulation. The tension between the pedagogic form of the novel, which explores political slogans and creates curiosity in the reader, and its criticism of the catechistic model of teaching, renders the novel paradoxically an anti-pedagogic pedagogic text.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dwan argues, is an embattled response to a broader crisis of humanism. Throughout the 1940s the merits and demerits of humanism were hotly debated, as Europeans began to reassess their moral heritage in the light of another disastrous global conflict. Humanism was repeatedly condemned as a metaphysically extravagant, morally complacent, and politically conservative attitude to the world, but it would also have its defenders. Orwell was one of humanism’s champions, remaining wedded to key ideals of human dignity, reason, and freedom, and the rights that these entail. But, as Nineteen Eighty-Four reveals, Orwell’s humanism was also a highly embattled one. The novel emphasizes the radical contingency of the human – and related ethical concepts like autonomy and dignity – while also staging various defences of these principles. This chapter explores the structure of this ambivalence.

‘If there is hope, […] it lies in the proles.’ Thus writes Winston Smith in his secret diary, in one of the most famous formulations from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This chapter takes a historical and historicist view of this remark, situating Winston’s and the novel’s account of the Oceanian proletariat in relation to Orwell’s understanding of the economico-political predicament of the working class in the 1930s and 1940s. The chapter considers the highly contentious bind into which Nineteen Eighty-Four puts the so-called ‘proles’, a group it constructs from a largely exterior point of view: caught between Winston’s belief in that group’s inevitable, albeit temporally distant, victory, and O’Brien’s insistence that the alleged ‘animalism’ of the proletariat will prevent it from gaining any kind of purchase on the future. I first outline how Orwell’s thinking on the relationship between socialism and the working class developed through the 1930s and 1940s, from The Road to Wigan Pier to the welfare state. I then discuss the moral and reproductive functions ascribed to the proles in the novel in light of Orwell’s political commitments, before addressing the question of whether the novel despairs of class politics, as thinkers such as Raymond Williams have argued.

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’.