“Good literature enlightens, great literature inspires action.”

Literature whether it is a newspaper, to a novel, effects the daily lives of humanity. Its contents can do greater good, or greater damage than word of mouth. This is to say that our literature is our history, and our history is written in ink, “Literature is the immortality of speech”- August Wilhelm von Schlegel. Literature in all its forms has the ability to enlighten is readers and to inspire the action it represents, however it is up to the audience of these texts to decide its worth; to heed its action or to forget its very warnings. The genre of dystopia in literature has arguably been one of the most influential in these respects. This is due to dystopia’s core concepts of placing our audience in a familiar but wildly distorted setting, thereby forcing its readers to views itself through a new lens. This is done in order to reveal the faults that we must rectify to prevent the future set before us. The dystopian novel of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is not a great text. This was not decide upon by its reviews or by its cult following, but by the way in which it failed to communicate its warnings to inspire the action necessary to prevent the reflected events we see in our modern day. It is a piece of literature that although passes the mark is terms of “great’ work by a purely commercial point of view, it hasn’t inspired beneficial action, that would prevent its audience from the very dystopian future he has created.

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