经典小说收藏版系列：1984（2024年新出版） Wordsworth Collectors Editions：Nineteen Eighty-Four

基本信息

Publisher：Wordsworth Editions Ltd

Language：English

Format:Hardback

ISBN-13：9781840228571

Dimensions：13.46 x 18.03 cm

信息仅供参考，具体以实物位置

书籍简介

《一九八四》（Nineteen Eighty-Four）是英国左翼作家乔治·奥威尔于1949年出版的长篇政治小说。

在这部作品中奥威尔刻画了一个令人感到窒息的恐怖世界，在假想的未来社会中，独裁者以追逐权力为目标，人性被强权彻底扼杀，自由被彻底剥夺，思想受到严酷钳制，人民的生活陷入了极度贫困，下层人民的人生变成了单调乏味的循环。

这部小说与英国作家阿道司·赫胥黎著作的《美丽新世界》，以及俄国作家叶夫根尼·伊万诺维奇·扎米亚京著作的《我们》并称反乌托邦的三部代表作。这部小说已经被翻译成62种语言，全球销量超过3000万册，是20世纪影响力较大的英语小说之一。2015年11月，该作被评为具影响力的20本学术书之一。

The Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother – 1984 itself: these terms and concepts have moved from the world of fiction into our everyday lives. They are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression; yet they were newly created by George Orwell in 1949 as he conjured his dystopian vision of a world where totalitarian power is absolute.

In this novel, continuously popular since its first publication, readers can explore the dark and extraordinary world he brought so fully to life. The principal characters who lead us through that world are ordinary human beings like ourselves: Winston Smith and Julia, whose falling in love is also an act of rebellion against the Party. Opposing them are the massed powers of the state, which watches its citizens on all sides through technology now only too familiar to us. No-one is free from surveillance; the past is constantly altered, so that there is no truth except the most recent version; and Big Brother, both loved and feared, controls all. Even the simple act of keeping a diary – as Winston does – is punishable by death. In Winston’s battle to keep his freedom of thought, he has a powerful adversary in O’Brien, who uses fear and pain to enter his very thought processes. Does 2+2 = 4? Or is it 5? We find out in Room 101. Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell’s last novel; but the world he created is always with us, as successive generations of readers find within it a mirror for their own times and a warning for the future.

作者简介

乔治·奥威尔（George Orwell），本名埃里克·亚瑟·布莱尔（Eric Arthur Blair）。

他为后人留下了大量的作品，仅以《动物庄园》和《1984》而言，他的影响已经不可估量。以至于为了指代某些奥威尔所描述过的社会现象，现代英语中还专门有一个词叫“奥威尔现象（Orwellian）”。如果说，贯穿奥威尔一生的作品主要是反映“贫困”和“政治”这两个主题，那么激发他这样写作的主要动力就是良知和真诚。1950年1月，奥威尔病逝，享年46岁。

Eric Blair (George Orwell as he was to become when a published writer) was a child of the Empire, born in Bengal, India, on June 25, 1903, the second child of Richard and Ida Blair. Richard was a civil servant in theDepartment . In 1904, his wife Ida, 18 years his junior, took the baby Eric and his older sister Marjorie back to England to live. Richard visited on leave only once, for 3 months in 1907, the point when Eric’s younger sister Avril was conceived. He retired back to England in 1911, the same year in which the eight-year-old Eric was sent to boarding school. Eric’s formative early years were thus spent entirely in his father’s absence.

Eric Blair’s time at his preparatory school, St. Cyprian’s, is recalled in his brief memoir, ‘Such, such were the joys’ (1947/1952), a coruscating account of the ‘desolate loneliness and helplessness’ he felt there, though he also cautions, ‘Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity’. From there he won places at both Eton and Wellington, and after a term at Wellington he took up a scholarship at Eton. He was by his own account reasonably happy there; a school built on and for privilege, it could also accommodate the contrarian. His biographer Bernard Crick notes of his lack of academic prowess at Eton, ‘There was no denying that it had been an undistinguished career.’ But it gave him an unrivalled understanding of the class system which would become one of his central subjects. And it was there, as he tells us in ‘Why I Write’ (1946), that he discovered a joy in words for their own sake.

On leaving school in 1921, Eric initially chose to follow his father and grandfather into the Indian service, taking the India Office examinations for entry into the Indian Imperial Police Force (as well as academic exams, there was a practical test in horse-riding). In 1922, aged 19, he headed to Burma to join the forces of imperialism. His iconic essays, ‘A Hanging’ (1931, written still under his own name) and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936), describe in retrospect pivotal events during his time in Burma. His first novel, Burmese Days, published under his new pseudonym George Orwell, likewise draws heavily on his experience there. Reading these works will give a good enough explanation of why, when home on leave in 1927, Blair resigned from the Service, without giving a reason. He had come to the point where he could no longer subscribe to the imperialism he was serving.