A Dialogue Between History And Literature

George Orwell's political satire Nineteen Eighty-Four has been regarded as one of the most influential literary works in the twentieth century. In the first half of twentieth century, human society went through two catastrophic world wars and varieties of holocausts whose cruelty was unprecedented. Accompanying the wars, the totalitarian rule began to emerge in Europe. Its dominance was so tyrannical that it overshadowed all the former oligarchic rules. Orwell's dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four gave a terrifying alarm about the existing political tendency of the world at that time. His work discloses the lies and reveals the truth to people. The historical perspectives in the novel happen to conform to the theories of New Historicists. This thesis analyzes Nineteen Eighty-Four through the New Historicism perspective, mainly concentrating on three aspects: Orwell's special experiences and world view, the postwar world situation and the historical meaning of the novel. Besides these, the hero of the novel and its dystopian form are analyzed from New Historicism perspective, as well. Thanks to their emphasis on combination of form and content, New Historicists make literary study return to wide social and cultural background from the study of literary text itself. Therefore, the theories of New Historicism provide a completely new perspective for us to analyze Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.