Ideology and Utopia in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
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Date
2014
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university Mouloud Mammeri of Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
This dissertation attempts to study the issue of ideology and utopia in two representative
examples of modern English Literature which are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)
and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Our major interest is to analyze and
compare the ideological and utopian elements in the two novels. Our aim through this study is
to identify which function each novel was meant to perform, whether ideological or utopian.
We take our theoretical bearings from Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1936). For
Mannheim, ideology reflects the concrete historical environment of a particular dominant
group that tries to perpetuate the social order, while utopia is an outlook, held by subjugated
groups in the same society, of a transformed and idealized future. This competing relationship
has resulted in dystopia. Thus, the two dystopias, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-
Four are meant to perform a double function for they hold an ideological as well as a utopian
outlook. Both, Huxley and Orwell are warning against many political practices they
recognize as threats to the British society. In this sense, they are trying to prevent change;
meanwhile they are directing people’s attention to the kind of society they should strive for
and thus, transform it.
Description
81p.:ill;30cm.(+cd)
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Comparative Literature