Dystopia/1984: Getting Started

Freedom or oppression? The fear of dystopia. Mike Ashley considers how British, Russian and American writers created repressive imaginary worlds and totalitarian regimes in order to explore 20th-century political concerns.

Orwell's review of Assignment in Utopia. Assignment in Utopia is widely recognised as one of the texts that served as inspiration for Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Nineteen Eighty-Four and the politics of dystopia Roger Luckhurst describes the political environment in which George Orwell wrote and published Nineteen Eighty-Four, and analyses its different – and often opposing – interpretations.

George Orwell's notebook in which he lists ideas for what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four, including 'newspeak', 'doublethink' and 'two minutes of hate'.