It is difficult now to recall the enormous impact that George Orwell's classic dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, had on the psyche of the western world. Written by a dying man in the grimmest of circumstances, the novel was intended as both a warning against totalitarianism and the debasement of language, and as a reaction to Orwell's personal experiences with English socialism and World War II. Clearly, "1984" has turned out differently than Orwell depicted. Yet the power of the novel remains undiminished: it continues to scare and enlighten future generations of readers nearly a half century after its original publication. Well-known scholar Robert Plank provides a psychological examination of the roots of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the curious parallels between the book and its antecedents, including the film Citizen Kane, the novels of Dostoevsky and Kafka, the philosophy of Whorf, Orwell's own life and works, and many other obvious and hidden influences. Complete with chronology, notes, bibliographies, and index.

Accessible and affordable biography, illustrated throughout in color

An Annotated Bibliography of the First 300 Publications of the Borgo Press, 1975-1998

This book investigates the normalisation of blame-shifting within ideological discourse as a broad feature of history, working from Churchill’s truism that history is written by the victors. To that end, it explores historical episodes of political persecution carried out under cover of moral panic, highlighting the process of ‘Othering’ common to each and theorising a historical model of panic-driven scapegoating from the results. Building this model from case studies in witch panic, communist panic and terrorist panic respectively, The Oldest Trick in the Book builds an argument that features common to each case study reflect broader historical patterning consistent with Churchill’s maxim. On this basis it argues that the periodic construction of bogeymen or ‘folk demons’ is a useful device for enabling the kind of victim-playing and victim-blaming critical to protecting elite privilege during periods of crisis and that in being a recurring theme historically, panic-driven scapegoating retains great ongoing value to the privileged and powerful, and thus conspicuously remains an ongoing feature of world politics.

A bibliography of science fiction and fantasy writer, editor, and publisher Robert Reginald, with an introduction by William F. Nolan and an Afterword by Jack Dann.

Presents a collection of critical essays about the works of Ray Bradbury.

"George Orwell is sometimes read as being disinterested in if not outright hostile to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell said things of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of his corpus, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While he is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and to those philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality is the first monograph written by a philosopher that offers a reading of Orwell informed by historical and contemporary philosophy and promises to better our understanding of him and his work"--

Concise discussions of the lives and principal works of prominent science-fiction authors, written by subject experts.