The Quest for the Authentic Life: In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984

In this book Ching-jung Kuo takes a new look at the two most iconic and disturbing dystopias of the middle of the last century: Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. We know these novels for what they have to say about the rise of consumerism and the dangers of totalitarianism, about the discontents of abundance and of scarcity, about the politics of forced happiness and the politics of suppression. Ching-jung Kuo, however, works out the relationships between these novels and their prevailing philosophical context, that of Existentialism. In his reading, the two dystopias assume fresh meaning. Rather than cautionary comments on their contexts of origin, these novels become narratives of quests for an authentic life. The effect of Ching-jung Kuo¿s new interpretation is to make the two novels even more moving, as readers are drawn into such quests themselves. Rudolphus Teeuwen