A Study on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from Peirce’s Semiotic Theory

Abstract: Totalitarianism, first put forward in the 1920s, was widely welcomed by western countries. And George Orwell, as one of the most famous satirical novelists in Britain, depended on his life experiences in the bottom society, made full use of his acute perception and sharp writing style, recorded a society under the reign of totalitarianism. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he dedicatedly described a totalitarianism society where people had been badly persecuted. This paper, based on Peirce’s semiotic theory and starts from signs’ definition and its connection with meaning, tries to analyze semiotic features, social mechanism and people’s life under the reign of totalitarianism and deepen reader’s comprehension of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Keywords: Nineteen Eighty-Four; totalitarianism; Peirce; sign

Pengyuan Zheng: School of Foreign Languages & Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China. E-mail: 2530265675@qq.com

*Corresponding author, Yongxiang Wang: School of Foreign Languages & Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China. E-mail: nshdyxwang@163.com