ABSTRACT
J N an age that has seen the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nazi revolution, and, most recently, the Islamic revolution, I984, the novel, looms over us as a kind of Frankenstein creation-an image of a monstrous society. Orwell's book is a modern Gothic, whose power over us is puzzling and disturbing. Are we to take it as a forecast of a real future, or an extrapolation of paranoid fears? The carefully crafted literary product of a gifted writer, or the compulsive working out of an author's personal fantasies? A novel or a political tract? Or what mixture of all of these elements?
