Anthony Burgess And Modernity

Anthony Burgess and modernity provides a variety of new perspectives and contexts for exploring Burgess’s literature and music. A range of international scholars and critics explore the writer’s novels, music and linguistic productions to explore and define how Burgess contributed to modernist and postmodernist art. The scholars who contributed to the book provide original explorations of Burgess’s work and the theological, psychological, linguistic, literary and musical contexts in which Burgess’s achievements can best be understood. It will appeal to scholars and students, but it also offers an appreciation of Burgess’s artistic achievements that will provide general readers of Burgess’s work with an insight into some of the exciting contexts in which Burgess novels can be read.

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.

Analyzes the work and influence of Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Conrad, Mann, Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Pirandelllo, Woolf, and Kafka

Contains a representative selection of critical essays upon the novels of Anthony Burgess.

First published in February 1936, just under a year from when the idea for it was first discussed, this is one of the most important and influential anthologies of the twentieth century. Since then three further editions by, in succession, Anne Ridler, Donald Hall and Peter Porter have been published. All took as their kernel the original selection by Michael Roberts. This "Faber Finds" reissue restores that pristine selection. More likely than not, the original idea was T. S. Eliot's, the choice of editor was undoubtedly his, and it was an inspired one. Michael Roberts was a poet himself, and a good one, but more important for this task was his acute awareness of the poetry scene, and his sense of the modern movement within it. Yes, his purpose was tendentious. He excludes some poets he admires such as Edmund Blunden and Walter de la Mare because (they) 'seem to me to have written good poems without having been compelled to make any notable development of poetic technique.' On the other hand, 'I have included only poems which seem to me to add to the resources of poetry, to be likely to influence the future development of poetry and language . . .' From the very start (and could there be a more arresting one?) with Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland" Michael Roberts powerfully and consistently fulfils that aim. Philip Hobsbaum, in "The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry," says of "The Faber Book of Modern Verse," 'it also encapsulates, as no other literary document quite does, the innovative quality of the 1930s.'

Discusses the history of New York City and describes the city, its people and their way of life today.

At the book's center are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power: Kenneth Toomey, eminent novelist, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into, bitter, luxurious old age as a celebrity of dubious notoriety, and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood.

A brilliantly funny spy novel, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, and treachery. From the author of the ground-breaking A Clockwork Orange. Denis Hillier is an aging British agent based in Yugoslavia. His old school friend Roper has defected to the USSR to become one of the evil empire's great scientific minds. Hillier must bring Roper back to England or risk losing his fat retirement bonus. As thoughtful as it is funny, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, treachery, and religion. Anthony Burgess's cast of astonishing characters includes Roper's German prostitute wife; Miss Devi and her Tamil love treatise; and the large Mr. Theodorescu, international secret monger and lascivious gourmand. A rare combination of the deadly serious and the absurd, the lofty and the lusty, Tremor of Intent will hold you in its thrall.

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.