This chapter explores how the essay, with its unlimited subject matter and the flexibility to address diverse audiences and ideas, provides public intellectuals with an invaluable and effective means of educating and challenging readers. It takes George Orwell as the model of the modern British public intellectual, someone whose interactive development as an intellectual and an essayist was fostered through numerous intellectual periodicals and magazines. It shows how four more recent essayists – Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Tariq Ali, and Mary Beard – adapt the Orwellian approach as polemicist and outsider. In distinct ways, public intellectuals extend and enliven the contemporary public sphere, ensuring that the essay remains critical to the collective exchange of opinion.

Kuhn claims after a revolutionary change of theory, scientists need to write new textbooks to incorporate the new theoretical perspective. The revisions do not merely involve the addition of the new discoveries. The task involves some rewriting of the history of the discipline. Kuhn suggests there are parallels to Orwell’s 1984. The “new” history of a scientific field is written to emphasize the continuity through the change. This chapter examines the role Kuhn’s comparison to 1984 plays in his argument, and the significance of the rewriting of a discipline’s history after a change of theory. The process tells us something about both how scientists are trained to work effectively and the nature of the changes that occur during a scientific revolution.

This chapter proposes that the representation of animals in contemporary writing is best understood as “literary zoontology”: the portrayal of animal existence, and of sociality among animals and humans, as an intertwined story of the reality of more-than-human life and literary meaning. The framework adopted is principally literary-theoretical. By analyzing some key contemporary critical approaches to making sense of animal life, I argue for attention to the “animal form” of contemporary texts, in which literary animal lives are not dissected into their actual and imaginary, embodied and aesthetic, parts. The analysis then opens onto a key example: George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The animal form of Animal Farm configures together what are normatively understood as essentially different “kinds” of living and being: human and animal, species and individual, speculative and actual, aesthetic and real. Indeed, focusing through the lens of literary zoontology offers us new ways to discover Orwell’s literary animals within the history of human-animal relations. As such, it is one way that literary reading can take us beyond the human-animal divide.

War intensifies conceptions of national identity, generating unifying models of ‘us’ that can be set against configurations of the enemy ‘other’. As enemies change, so too does the model of the nation that confronts them. Yet, while the nation at war is necessarily protean, the pressure to articulate it as a coherent entity increases. This chapter uses the Second World War as a case study of war’s capacity to reimagine the nation and to generate coercive models of belonging and exclusion. Exploring both British film culture and the writing of cooperation and complaint, the chapter draws on diverse examples to map the mutation of the national ideal from a mythological ‘village England’ to an imagined future for a new generation. This transition from the spatial to the temporal encapsulates the difficulty of finding common ‘national’ ground and viable discourses of patriotism in the aftermath of the First World War.

Today three forces threaten to limit speech. The first pits guns against words, creating a showdown between the Second Amendment and the First. The second sees powerful speakers invoking their right to speak in order to silence other people’s speech. Third, and perhaps the most subtle, the monitoring of our digital speech by government and business chills our ability to say what we want online. Free speech will survive provided we remain vigilant in defending the speech rights of the minority against what has been called the tyranny of the majority.

The founding fathers of English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare, bequeathed a range of possible attitudes to Jews and Judaism. These can be found in the ambivalent figure of “the Jew” – malign and benign, medieval and modern – in much 19th- and 20th-century English literature, from the romantic poets to imperial writers, and from realist novelists to modernist writers of all kinds. The essay contextualizes these changing attitudes and ends with Graham Greene, George Orwell, and Margaret Drabble.

Roslyn Jolly’s chapter discusses the particular burden carried by the prose of the travel writer. Travel writing faces such potentially opposing tasks as to render a foreign scene strange and exotic while bestowing it with an air of authenticity and verisimilitude, and in doing so makes it appeal to the senses and exercises telling control or choice of narrative perspective. These various pressures and strategies appear fairly consistently throughout the long history of travel writing, which takes in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Jonathan Raban. They also cross into prose fiction, where it is influenced by the travel memoir or tourist guide.

The chapter on words shows that even when mimicking worn-out, hackneyed speech styles, the vitality of creative language use can rescue wording from those atmospheres – of marketing and of politicking, for example – where language has become tired and predictable. The chapter considers the play of chance in any formation of wording, as the unruliness of graphemes and phonemes contributes over and above semantics. It shows that words are activated by syntax as they pass into phrases and that style emerges from the unpredictable influence of their scriptive, acoustic and etymological properties.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the censor’s dilemma: the notion that censors in America may wield significant power for a limited time, but ultimately are undone by the principles of free expression embodied in the First Amendment. Because of this, reformers seek to avoid the label of “censor,” even when their goal is to suppress speech. The urge to censor comes from both the political left and the right, yet both sides claim that only their antagonists engage in censorship. Paradoxically, censors exude sanctimony and a sense of certainty, but cannot shake off the taint of illegitimacy in societies devoted to freedom of expression.

The first chapter asks whether there is a threatening slippery slope from William James's pragmatist conception of truth (as presented in his 1907 work, Pragmatism), via Richard Rorty's radical neopragmatism, to Donald Trump's and other populists' fragmentation of the concept of truth, or even ultimately to the destruction of truth depicted in George Orwell's dystopic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), whose character O'Brien was interestingly analyzed by Rorty in a 1989 essay on Orwell, arguing for the primacy of freedom over truth. The chapter criticizes Rortyan pragmatism by arguing that the concept of freedom also presupposes the concept of truth (and not just the other way round), also suggesting that, despite the unclarity of some of James's original ideas about truth, there is a sound core to the Jamesian conception of the pursuit of truth. It is, furthermore, suggested that the concept of truth may itself receive a plurality of interpretations within a (meta-level) pragmatist understanding of truth, one of them being the realistic correspondence account, which remains highly relevant, e.g., in the context of combatting post-truth politics.

Overview is inseparable from its retrospective dimension in any look back on the evolution of the codex under shifting technical conditions, from moveable type to pixel backlight. A “cross-sectional” approach to the book/text/medium triad involves chapters arranged here in three respective pairs. First (Part I): the plastic art of the codex, divided between the graphics of easel treatment and conceptual book sculpture. Next (Part II): in close comparison with such material form, an intensive reading of phonemic wording – in its mediating linguistic texture – thrown into relief by visual rather than verbal “signage” in narrative cinema as an alternative time-based medium. Finally (Part III): the ontology of human speech pursued, over against its media ideology, by contemporary theorists Giorgio Agamben and Friedrich Kittler. The introduction also looks back on the “speakwrite” in George Orwell’s 1984 as a mode of dictation contrasted with the transgressive sensuality of handwriting on outmoded paper pages early in the novel.

This chapter considers the politics of the archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The manipulation of history and of the individual experience of time is a key way through which power maintains its dystopian and totalitarian hold on Oceania. I examine images of manipulated public and individual archives in Nineteen Eighty-Four, from the memory holes to doublethink, arguing that the Party’s control of time is aimed at fashioning the present as the culmination of history and at ensuring the future as mere reproduction of the present. If the Party’s power works along temporal lines, the same is true of Winston’s rebellion, which begins in earnest with Winston writing a diary addressed to the future and the past. I examine images of archives that seek to fissure the Party’s totalitarian control of time, from Winston’s fragile memories to the diary itself. The volatility and violent erasures characteristic of Oceania’s archives entail that Winston’s challenge to the totalitarian closure of the Party’s endless present – a challenge encapsulated by his diary – is unsuccessful. Yet Winston’s testimony finds its hoped-for future readers: us. The chapter concludes by gesturing to how the trope of a diary counteracting power’s control of the archive returns in ensuing dystopian novels.

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.

‘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 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.

When I was writing The Moral Arc, I found my life-long libertarianism challenged on so many fronts that I began to reconsider my politics and to look for a new label, one that better described what I came to believe was the right balance between Left and Right, between liberalism and conservatism. I believe I may have found it in classical liberalism, a defense of which follows in this essay, originally published in the online magazine Quillette.

Seán O’Faoláin is the embodiment in twentieth-century Irish cultural life of a version of the European public intellectual. A commentator on Irish and world affairs, he responded frequently to the political directives of the mid-century decades, pushing against the pressures towards insularity and clerical nationalism and recruiting literary culture to his cause. Co-founder of the influential journal The Bell, he was also a journalist and essayist, the author of fiction, several major biographies, travel writer and literary critic. Across this eclectic oeuvre O’Faoláin advanced his sense of a world in which the writer worked to maintain connections with English and Continental culture, claiming for Ireland a European position. In the 1940s his voice was perhaps at its most impressive and diverse, culminating in the publication in 1947 of The Irish: A Character Study, his vibrant diagnosis of the emerging nation. This chapter reassesses O’Faoláin’s role as a European public intellectual in a time of global crisis, drawing new comparisons between O’Faoláin and a diverse array of contemporary commentators including Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt.

Richard Kerridge describes the literary, cultural and scientific context of Plath’s interest in wild animals, landscape, climate and pollution. The letters and journals show that this interest was intense, but also that it was not scientific or systematic, even in a rudimentary way. Plath’s strategy was to preserve the dramatic immediacy of unexpected encounters with wildlife, rather than frame those encounters with scientific information. Nevertheless, an emergent ecological consciousness and environmental concern are evident in her writing. Kerridge provides the historical and scientific background for this concern, by outlining the major conceptual shifts that were taking place in ecological science, the recent history of wild nature in literature, and some of the changing popular attitudes in Britain and the USA.