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George Orwell

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Books in the CBL

Nineteen Eighty-Four (AUDIOBOOK) by George Orwell (Contribution by); Richard Brown (Read by) For use in schools and libraries only. Portrays life in a future time when a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "negative utopia" in its representation of an imaginary world that is completely convincing.
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eBooks

Nineteen Eighty-Four Related Texts

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free.
Call Number: DYSTOPIAN HUXLEY
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess A vicious fifteen-year-old "droog" is the central character of this 1963 classic, whose stark terror was captured in Stanley Kubrick's magnificent film of the same title. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex—to "redeem" him—the novel asks, "At what cost?"
Call Number: DYSTOPIAN BURGESS
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury In a society in which books are outlawed, Montag, a regimented fireman in charge of burning the forbidden volumes, meets a revolutionary school teacher who dares to read. Suddenly he finds himself a hunted fugitive, forced to choose not only between two women, but between personal safety and intellectual freedom.
Call Number: DYSTOPIAN BRADBURY
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
Call Number: DYSTOPIAN ATWOOD

Podcasts

Dystopian World of 1984 Explained

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Useful Weblinks

STUDY GUIDES

Cliff Notes: 1984
This study guide is produced by Cliff Notes. Follow the link on the left to explore all aspects of the guide.
LitCharts: 1984 by George Orwell
This study guide includes links to introduction, plot summary, detailed summary and analysis, themes, quotes, characters, symbols and theme wheel.
Shmoop: 1984 Analysis
This study guide is produced by Shmoop. Follow the links on the left to navigate the guide.
Spark Notes: 1984
This study guide is published by Spark Notes.
The Ultimate Nineteen Eighty-Four Cheatsheet
This study guide has been published by Matrix Education and covers the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, plot summary, important characters, key contextual ideas and main themes and analysis.

ACADEMIC ARTICLES

Ben Pimlott: Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four This essay is written by Professor Ben Pimlott, a leading historian and political biographer of post-war Britain, and published on the Orwell Foundation website.
Nineteen Eighty-Four Turns Sixty This article by Brian McFarlane was published on Inside Story 9 June 2009.
NATURE AND HUMAN LIBERTY: The Golden Country in George Orwell's "1984" and an Alternative Conception of Human Freedom by Piers H.G. Stephens The relationship of human liberty to both external nature and human inner nature entails a complex knot of questions that have long been the subject of intense philosophical discussion. In the modern era, a strong dichotomy developed between these concepts in which human freedom was counterposed to an apparently determinate nature that existed as a valueless res extensa. In this article, however, the author argues for the presence and vitality of an alternative concept of human liberty, one that relies not on the ownership of property but on nature as a point outside the system of human instrumental control and as the hall of mirrors represented by collective solipsism. The author arrives at this point through careful study of the underresearched naturalistic scenes and elements in George Orwell's highly influential 1984, drawing out the complex interconnections of nature, liberty, and fulfillment found within them. This study illustrates the usefulness of the dystopian imagination to theorizing relationships between nature and humanity.
The Dynamics of Terror in Orwell's "1984" by Malcolm R. Thorp
George Orwell's Obscured Utopia by H. Mark Roelofs The central hypothesis of the paper is that Orwell's 1984, far from being an implicit defence of such liberal democratic values as privacy and personal freedom, is a defence of authentic socialism - that is, a community rather than a socialism that seeks the rational allocation of resources among all eligible participants.
Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four by Robert Paul Resch
All Propaganda is Dangerous, but Some are More Dangerous than Others: George Orwell and the Use of Literature as Propaganda by Samantha Senn The true battles of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union were fought on the ideological front: pitting democracy and capitalism against totalitarianism and communism. The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in the late 1940s to help combat the spread of Communism across Europe and in the United States. Part of the “psychological warfare” included the use of propaganda. Around the same time, British author George Orwell had recently published Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both novels, due to the anti-Communist overtones, were adopted by the OPC as part of a larger anti-Soviet campaign. By examining the use by intelligence agencies of Orwell’s works during the Cold War and the potential use of those works in a post-9/11 global society, this paper aims to illustrate the fickle nature of literary works as propaganda.
Language and Ideology in Orwell's 1984 by Steven Blakemore

Crowdsourced Resources

These links are to resources produced by HSC teachers and students, not from this College. Please read all material with a critical eye.

Save my HSC: Common Module: Nineteen Eighty-Four
A story about textual form
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Summary and Analysis
This article is written by Lancelot Nelson, a teacher of English Literature, and published on the website, Owlcation.

Audiobooks

Listen to the first chapter read by Peter Capaldi.

Videos

Dystopian Feature Films on Clickview
Follow this link to explore the Clickview collection of Dystopian Feature Films.