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Winston's Parallel Universe: On History in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Ist Teil von
The Explicator, 2022, Vol.80 (1-2), p.49-52
Ort / Verlag
Washington: Routledge
Erscheinungsjahr
2022
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Taylor & Francis
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Frauen asserts that a most peculiar claim about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) can be found in the non-fictional part of a commissioned book on Orwell by his fellow novelist Anthony Burgess: Somebody in 1949 told me that Orwell had wanted to call it Nineteen Forty-Eight. But they wouldn't let him". One naturally tends to take this claim as merely one more indication that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a twisted satire of Orwell's present, rather than a serious vision of a future to come. However, an argument in support of Burgess's strange claim can perhaps be made by employing The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, "the book" within the book that displays the political dynamics and history of Winston's world. The attentive reader quickly notices that the history described in the book does not seem to match ours. Of course, large parts of Europe including the USSR, Germany, Italy and Spain had already been or turned totalitarian in the real-world 1930s as well.