Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is, with the same author’s Animal Farm, one of the most widely read pieces of political writing of the twentieth century. Its vision is of a world in which three rival superpowers – Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia – are locked in an endless but, in fact, symbiotic war (there are alternating periods of peace between two of the powers, which remain at war with the third, with alliances changing depending on who is at war with whom). The war is a stalemate (or, rather, an ideological fiction in which all three sides collaborate) whose continuance ensures that the citizens of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia remain in a constant state of submission to the forces of hatred, artificial …
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Citation: Hopkins, Chris. "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 November 2002; last revised 03 November 2005. [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3313, accessed 24 November 2024.]
