Literary Precedents for Riddley Walker

Riddley Walker Literary Precedents

Although Hoban has referred to Charles Williams, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and a host of other authors whose work has influenced him to some extent, the precedents for Riddley Walker include works which reveal how changes in the human condition result in changes in human consciousness, specifically as regards language. Thus Huxley's Brave New World (1946), in which remnants of earlier times survive as part of a state religion, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which distortions of historical record tend to annihilate the past, Burgess's The Wanting Seed (1962) and A Clockwork Orange (1986), in which the sense of past traditions has disappeared and a new language has evolved to meet the demands of a new age, and similar works have had some influence on Riddley Walker.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) also includes surprising parallels. Much of Riddley's conception of...
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