The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess : Fire of Words
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19295472
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 978-3-319-66410-1
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This 300-page monograph collects and analyses a large body of material – the works of Anthony Burgess – using a framework informed by literary criticism, philosophy and aesthetics. The sources for this book include existing commentaries, engagement with those researching Burgess, existing research and theses into the subject, as well as the texts themselves, which together provide for an array of insights that are synthesised, argued, and elaborated in depth.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This monograph presents the first full-length study on Anthony Burgess's fiction for some decades, and proposes 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 diverse range of novels through the framework of the artistic process, informed by Nietzsche's reading of the aesthetic dichotomy of Apollo and Dionysus. The research charts 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.
The research confirms Burgess's seminal role as both late modernist and early postmodernist. It goes on to offer a critical and constructive inquiry into the aesthetics of Burgess’ work, as his muses, world views and artistic creativity evolved and were personified in his fiction, autobiographical and cinematic pieces (influenced by his growth, upheaval and success). The inquiry in this book generates certain implications in relation to Burgess’s insertion of avatars of himself into his own fiction, which in turn question assumptions about Burgess’s position in relation to modernism and postmodernism. Scholarship struggles to provide a coherent narrative of Burgess’ artistic development, whereas, as a Cambridge Quarterly review notes, this research ‘manages a survey of every major text and even gives a sense of shape to the whole, both conceptually and poetically’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -