Overview
Considers Burgess's fiction in toto, and offers readers a route into his fiction which takes account of his entire literary achievement and the substantial recent academic attention it has achieved
Despite the sustained interest in Burgess's fiction, there has been a curious paucity of book literary scholarship about his literary work
Posits three first principles – that Burgess posited a fundamental duality which can aesthetically be expressed by reference to Nietzsche's opposition of Dionysus and Apollo; that Burgess wrote extensively about artists and the artistic impulse; and that Burgess often included avatars of himself in his own works
Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
The book is the first full-length text on Anthony Burgess's fiction in a generation, and offers a radical and innovative way of understanding the extensive literary achievements of one of the twentieth century's most innovative authors. This book explores Burgess's dazzlingly diverse range of novels through the one key theme which links them all – the artistic process itself.
Borrowing from Nietzsche's aesthetic dichotomy of Apollo and Dionysus, the book uncovers the protracted evolution of Burgess's fiction and offers a unifying theory which links his early postcolonial fiction chronologically, via his modernist experiments like A Clockwork Orange and Nothing Like The Sun, to his late classics Mozart and the Wolfgang and A Dead Man in Deptford.
This volume clarifies Burgess's seminal role as both late modernist and early postmodernist, and lucidly unveils the legacy of England's most mercurial novelist.
Reviews
“The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess takes the very question of creativity and prolificacy as its core theme. By focusing upon the writer and composer characters who pop up everywhere in Burgess’s novels, Clarke manages a survey of every major text and even gives a sense of shape to the whole, both conceptually and poetically.” (Joseph Darlington, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 47 (4), December, 2018)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jim Clarke is Senior Lecturer and Course Director of English and Journalism at Coventry University, UK. He is the author of the OUP bibliography of Anthony Burgess, and has written extensively on Burgess, James Joyce, JG Ballard, and Science Fiction. He is principal investigator on the 'Ponying the Slovos' project.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess
Book Subtitle: Fire of Words
Authors: Jim Clarke
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66411-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-66410-1Published: 13 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88237-6Published: 25 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-66411-8Published: 26 October 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 303
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Fiction