The memory of Orwell : the history of Nineteen Eight-Four's reception

This research paper was completed and submitted at Nipissing University, and is made freely accessible through the University of Toronto’s TSpace repositoryThe history of literary reception is an oft-ignored area of inquiry, even amongst immensely popular and seemingly influential works. Yet a work of literature can serve as a focal point for a shared experience. By gauging the audience's reception to a work, one can analyze the historical context in which the reviewer is operating and come to understand popular ideas and trends. This paper considers George Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four as a case study, since its popularity has not waned since its publication in 1949. As a result, there are numerous recorded instances of responses to the novel, ranging from initial critical reaction, through its canonization in to the high school curriculum, to its mobilization for political reasons in the 1980s. After the Cold War, academia began to focus on this work which scholars had neglected for most of its existence. These evolutionary steps in the reception of the novel parallel the geopolitical conditions at the time of their publication: in the immediate postwar period, British critics interpreted the novel as a contemporary satire, whereas American critics, who had not experienced wartime conditions in Britain, viewed the piece as a prophetic warning against totalitarianism. By the height of Rightist Western sentiment in the 1980s, responses blatantly assume the novel to be anti-Communist. Through all of this, the role of Orwell in informing interpretations varies, remaining strong through the initial reception (since Orwell was known best to his contemporaries as a journalist and activist) and waning in the 1980s as scholars claimed the work for their own ideological purposes (such as the neoconservative), leading to a strong backlash from Orwellian biographers in the 1990s. These responses emphasize the relationship between the readers' political context and their interpretations of the novel, thus demonstrating the useful application of reception history