Ideology, power, and social disillusionment: Marxist comparative reading of nineteen eighty-four, burmese days, palace walk and the Harafish

Abstract

The paper analyses the concepts of social disillusionment in the writings of George Orwell and Naguib Mahfouz using a comparative analysis of the writings using Marxist approach to literature. The comparison of Orwell and Burmae Days with Nineteen Eighty Four and Mahfouz with Palace Walk and The Harafish helps the study to look at how political authority, the colonial power, and the social hierarchy influence the consciousness of the individuals, and the experiences it can cause alienation and ideological contradictions. Based on the Marxist literary theory, the proposed study explores the way in which literary narratives reveal the contradictions inherent in the social arrangements of the systems and how the ideological hegemony of the forms of power remains preserved. The article presents thematic similarities in how the authors present their themes of surveillance, class inequality, and institutional authority by employing a qualitative comparative approach through a close textual analysis approach. The results prove that the differences in narrative form are not relevant to the dystopian political fiction by Orwell and the social realism by Mahfouz because the authors describe the societies in which people feel deeply disillusioned because of structural oppression and ideological control. In the comparative analysis, the literature of various cultural traditions can express the similar criticism of social inequality and institutional power. Having placed Orwell and Mahfouz in the same theoretical context, this research paper not only makes a contribution to the comparative literary literature, but also highlights the enduring applicability of the two authors to explain how literature, ideology, and social criticism should interact in contemporary societies.