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'Rich and compelling...Lynskey's account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory.”--George Packer, The Atlantic An authoritative, wide-ranging, and incredibly timely history of 1984--its literary sources, its composition by Orwell, its deep and lasting effect on the Cold War, and its vast influence throughout world culture at every level, from high to pop.1984 isn't just a novel; it's a key to understanding the modern world. George Orwell's final work is a treasure chest of ideas and memes--Big Brother, the Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, 2+2=5--that gain potency with every year. Particularly in 2016, when the election of Donald Trump made it a bestseller ('Ministry of Alternative Facts,'anyone?). Its influence has morphed endlessly into novels (The Handmaid's Tale), films (Brazil), television shows (V for Vendetta), rock albums (Diamond Dogs), commercials (Apple), even reality TV (Big Brother). The Ministry of Truth is the first book that fully examines the epochal and cultural event that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Great Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. It explains how fiction history informs fiction and how fiction explains history.

This book will appeal to everyone who reads science fiction or thinks about science and its impact on our lives. It raises profound economic, ethical, political, sociological, and psychological questions. It explores our fears and fantasies as it examines a range of fictions, films, and TV programs that speculate about the possibilities of humans in the future. The contributions here ask central questions that have provoked the creators and readers of science fiction since Mary Shelley inaugurated the genre with her novel Frankenstein. What are the aims and limits of science and technology? What are our responsibilities toward the products of our advancing science and technology? What kinds of creatures will we produce or encounter in the future? What rights will we grant to these creatures or – more worryingly – will they grant to us? Do science and technology make us more civilized or more barbaric? How should we treat each other? Ultimately, what does it mean to be human?

This book examines the recent popularity of the dystopian genre in literature and film, as well as connecting contemporary manifestations of dystopia to cultural trends and the implications of technological and social changes on the individual and society as a whole. Dystopia, as a genre, reflects our greatest fears of what the future might bring, based on analysis of the present. This book connects traditional dystopian works with their contexts and compares these with contemporary versions. It centers around two main questions: Why is dystopia so popular now? And, why is dystopia so popular with young adult audiences?Since dystopia reflects the fears of society as a whole, this book will have broad appeal for any reader, and will be particularly useful to teachers in a variety of settings, such as in a high school or college-level classroom to teach dystopian literature, or in a comparative literature classroom to show how the genre has appeared in multiple locales at different times. Indeed, the book's interdisciplinary nature allows it to be of use in classes focussing on politics, bioethics, privacy issues, women's studies, and any number of additional topics.

On the 5th December 2014 the second joint workshop of the 9th Programme of Research Development Areas at Charles University (PRVOUK 09), “Literature and Art in Intercultural Contexts” was held. As regards the form of its organization as well as the mode of discussion, it followed the first interdisciplinary meeting, which was dedicated to the issues of artistic identity, conceived as a distinctive cultural agent. Summaries of the papers from this first meeting have been published in a volume Identities – Construction, Subversion and Absence (Identity – konstrukce, subverze a absence, Petr A. Bílek, Martin Procházka, Jan Wiendl, eds., Prague: Faculty of Arts of Charles University, 2014, 131 pp., ISBN 978–80–7308–530–8), which can be accessed electronically. The second interdisciplinary workshop focused on the broadly defined relationship “Utopias/Dystopias: Forms and Transformations in Arts Studies, Historical and Philological Disciplines”. It was organized according to the individual sub- programmes of the 9th research programme: Transformations in the Cultural History of Anglophone Countries: Identities, Periods and Canons; Pulp Literature: The “Trivial” and “Debased” Genres and Forms; Culture and Totalitarianism; and Methodology of Editorial Work. While the structure of the previous volume copies that of the research programme, this book follows a different pattern across the boundaries between individual research teams, thus approaching the form of a collaborative monograph. Based on a chronological arrangement of topics, it aims to establish a framework for the confrontation of diverse issues related to the theme of utopia/dystopia in the context of Anglophone literatures and cultures, within the framework of Czech literature, with respect to its relations to the Francophone area, in relation to the history of art media and from the perspective of more general historiographical contexts. The introductory chapter by the literary historian and translator Josef Hrdlička is entitled “Exiles in the Future Homeland: the Utopian Places of Romantic and Post- romantic Poetry” and focuses on selected representations of utopian places in poetry. The question of the genesis of the poetic utopia is viewed, among others, with regard to Peter Burke's proposition about the gradual separation of “high” literature from the rest of literary production and its consequent loss of a wider readership, or, more precisely, of the relationship to the audience in general. In the works of selected poets (Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire and Karel Hynek Mácha), Hrdlička proceeds from the absence of a readership/community to its imaginary constitution by means of discursive strategies in individual poems. The chapter concludes by discussing the nature of these utopias, which might differ even within the work of a single author. “Utopias of Love, Industry and Knowledge: The Ideals of Mid- Nineteenth Century Czech Society” is a chapter authored by two literary historians, Petra Hesová and Václav Vaněk. It focuses in particular on the situation of the 1840s, the decade in which a specific sense of future emerged in Czech society, namely the time of the first inquiries into the meaning of the Czech nation's existence and its aims. As a response to these inquiries, the first theoretical projects and projections of the future started to appear. However, these are always determined either by disciplinary (K. S. Amerling, J. E. Purkyně) or ideological frameworks (F. M. Klácel, K. Sabina, A. Smetana). Their rather vague notions contrast with Bolzano's treatise “On the Best State”, whose effect on the Czech background was, however, significantly limited. The authors conclude that manifestations of utopianism in Czech society had outlasted the year 1848 and are found in the form of fiction (J. J. Kollár, K. Sabina) until the early 1860s, when Czech society opened a space for an independent articulat

The all-new essays in this book respond to the question, How do spaces in science fiction, both built and unbuilt, help shape the relationships among humans, other animals and their shared environments? Spaces, as well as a sense of place or belonging, play major roles in many science fiction works. This book focuses especially on depictions of the future that include, but move beyond, dystopias and offer us ways to imagine reinventing ourselves and our perspectives; especially our links to and views of new environments. There are ecocritical texts that deal with space/place and science fiction criticism that deals with dystopias but there is no other collection that focuses on the intersection of the two.

Now is an opportune moment to consider the shifts in youth and popular culture that are signalled by texts that are being read and viewed by young people. In a world seemingly compromised by climate change, political and religious upheavals and economic irresponsibility, and at a time of fundamental social change, young people are devouring fictional texts that focus on the edges of identity, the points of transition and rupture, and the assumption of new and hybrid identities. This book draws on a range of international texts to address these issues, and to examine the ways in which key popular genres in the contemporary market for young people are being re-defined and re-positioned in the light of urgent questions about the environment, identity, one's place in the world, and the fragile nature of the world itself. The key questions are: • What are the shifts and changes in youth culture that are identified by the market and by what young people read and view?• How do these texts negotiate the addressing of significant questions relating to the world today?• Why are these texts so popular with young people?• What are the most popular genres in contemporary best-sellers and films?• Do these texts have a global appeal, and, if so, why?These over-arching themes and ideas are presented as a collection of inter-related essays exploring a rich variety of forms and styles from graphic novels to urban realism, from fantasy to dystopian writing, from epic narratives to television musicals. The subjects and themes discussed here reveal the quite remarkable diversity of issues that arise in youth fiction and the variety of fictional forms in which they are explored. Once seen as not as important as adult fiction, this book clearly demonstrates that youth fiction (and the popular appeal of this fiction) is complex, durable and far-reaching in its scope.

Great starting point for students seeking an introduction to the theme and the critical discussions surrounding it.