Genre: Dystopia and Horror

About the lecture

In this module, we think about the genre of Nineteen Eighty-Four, focusing in particular on: (i) what defines a literary genre – Thomas Pavel’s concept of ‘norms’ and ‘habits’, and Brian Attebery’s ‘fuzzy set’ genre theory; (ii) the extent to which Nineteen Eighty-Four has elements of more than one genre – dystopia, romance, tragedy, horror, etc.; (iii) the concepts of ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ and the key characteristics of the dystopian novel in particular – the theories of Gregory Claeys and Christopher Ferns; (iv) the first dystopian novels – Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909), Yevgen Yamyatin’s We (1924), Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World (1926) and Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937); (v) the typical narrative of a dystopian novel; (vi) the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on dystopian fiction, e.g. Anthony Burgess’ 1985 (1978), Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta (1982-89), Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (2009), etc.; and (vii) the extent to which Nineteen Eighty-Four might be thought of as a gothic horror novel.

About the lecturer

Dr Adam Stock is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at York St John University. As a researcher, he specialises in the interdisciplinary areas of utopian studies, science fiction and modernisms. His book Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought: Narratives of World Politics (2019) examined dystopian fiction from the first half of the twentieth century, while he is currently interested in questions about boundaries and borderlands, spatialisation, and the temporalities of speculative fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century.