Dictionaries are works of literature: they have an author, a plot, and a narrative. They have also been the object of fascination of writers–poets, novelists, and essayists– from diverse languages, from Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, Denis Diderot, and Gustave Flaubert, to Czeslaw, George Orwell, George Perec, William Thackery, and Voltaire. At times, the structure of a lexicon is emulated in a work of fiction; in others, it is at the heart of a storyline. This meditation explores the wide range of tributes dictionaries have occasioned as well as volumes about the making of specific lexicons, such as the Oxford English Dictionary.

The “Afterward” reminds us, via George Orwell, that, like us, democracies in the past have also endured eras when long-standing principles and practices have been severely challenged. Donald Trump is the epitome of that challenge today, and his figurative presence haunted the writing of this book. Moreover, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, in their Democracy for Realists, demonstrate that rejecting the national Story today (which they call “the folk theory”), on the basis of empirical research but without providing a replacement, is something that we might decide not to do within the guidelines of choosing, refraining, and dissembling.

Chapter 2 delves into George Orwell’s use of the second-person pronoun in Down and Out in Paris and London published in 1933. It has been rarely noted in Orwell’s autobiographical essay and yet, alternating between the ‘I’ pronoun and the indefinite ‘one’, it uniquely brings the reader to more directly experience what other sentient beings living in deprivation are going through. A detailed quantitative as well as qualitative analysis is offered, classifying the different ‘you’ that pervade the text based on linguistic clues and contextual parameters, exposing all the plasticity of the pronoun. The results show that ‘you’ oscillates between specificity and genericity in a way subtly exploited by Orwell in his attempt at implicating the reader in re-living his experience as a tramp through writing about it.

An introduction to the history Nineteen Eighty-Four, its key themes, and the way the chapters in the book intersect with and respond to them.

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.

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 explores the relation between the novel form and the emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism and posthumanism in the second half of the twentieth century. It begins with an analysis of the relation between the prosthetic and the simulacral, under postmodern conditions, and with the technological revolution associated with the advent of computing. The novel, it suggests, from Orwell to Brooke-Rose, is involved in a difficult relationship with postmodernism, one which gives expression to its possibilities, while also seeking to resist its erosion of the materiality of our cultures and environments. It traces a strand of experimental realism in the postwar novel that is at odds with the terms in which we have conceived of postmodern fiction. It then goes on to read two of the novelists who are associated with the postmodern novel – Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison – to suggest that one can detect a persistent opposition in their work between the simulacrum and the prosthetic, one which helps us see past some of the contradictions that are the result of our existing accounts of postmodern politics and aesthetics.

This chapter challenges the persistent view, influenced by George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, of the crushing of private life under dictatorship. Orwell’s depiction rests on an assumption that private life constituted the antithesis of ‘the political’. The chapter critiques this position in two ways through analysing sources including private diaries and letters. On one hand, it argues that although the legal protection afforded to the private sphere under National Socialism was severely eroded, there were limits in practice to how far the state could extend its grasp. On the other hand, it shows how readily many individuals adapted to the new conditions. Far from regarding personal diaries and letters as a medium through which they could escape from politics, many Germans used such private writing to position themselves in relation to the new regime: to that extent, under Nazism ‘the political’ could become the basis for a reconfigured private life.

This chapter critiques the way in which historians of National Socialism have dealt with the topic of private life, highlights recent new developments in the historiography that can be built on, and shows how concepts of privacy and the private drawn from sociology and political theory can usefully be applied and tested in relation to developments under the Nazi dictatorship.