Anthony Burgess combined high artistic seriousness with very broad popular appeal. The writer of A Clockwork Orange and Napoleon Symphony variously cast himself in the roles of uncompromising artist and willing entertainer. What links these contradictory aspirations is Burgess' ambivalent relationship with James Joyce. In his daring experimentation with the novel form, Burgess always had the Joycean example to emulate, but he also invoked the great precursor to vindicate the rawer components of his art. The author is not blinded by his comparative agenda to Burgess' debts incurred elsewhere. Burgess' work reverberates with echoes of lesser masters as well as securely canonized classics: his voices include the Maughamesque and the Shakespearean as they do the Eliotian and, of course, the Joycean. Anthony Burgess is thus reintroduced as a (post)modern classic himself: Jake's deserving peer and Will's true son.

Celebrating the centenary of Anthony Burgess’s birth, this book reveals the true relation that the British author had with France. It brings together a collection of papers by a selected group of academics who explore the sizeable French literary and musical heritage that inspired Burgess in his creations and adaptations. It shows that the portrait of Anthony Burgess would be incomplete if the importance and influence of French literary and musical works on his career are not considered. Adopting a multifaceted approach, the book includes numerous in-depth analyses of Anthony Burgess’s works in reference to famous French writers, such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Lévi-Strauss, Molière, and Rostand, and French composers, including Berlioz, Bizet, Boulez, Debussy, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns. These artists, indeed French culture in general, left a profound and indelible mark on Anthony Burgess.

There is a strong tradition of literary analyses of the musical artwork. Simply put, all musicology - any writing about music - is an attempt at making analogies between what happens within the world of sound and language itself. This study considers this analogy from the opposite perspective: authors attempting to structure words using musical forms and techniques. It's a viewpoint much more rarely explored, and none of the extant studies of novelists' musical techniques have been done by musicians. Can a novel follow the form of a symphony and still succeed as a novel? Can musical counterpoint be mimicked by words on a page? Alan Shockley begins looking for answers by examining music's appeal for novelists, and then explores two brief works, a prose fugue by Douglas Hofstadter, and a short story by Anthony Burgess modeled after a Mozart symphony. Analyses of three large, emblematic attempts at musical writing follow. The much debated 'Sirens' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, which the author famously likened to a fugue, Burgess' largely ignored Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements, patterned on Beethoven's Eroica, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which Shockley examines as an attempt at composing a fully musicalized language. After these three larger analyses, Shockley discusses two quite recent brief novels, William Gaddis' novella Agapgape and David Markson's This is not a novel, proposing that each of these confounding texts coheres elegantly when viewed as a musically-structured work. From the perspective of a composer, Shockley offers the reader fresh tools for approaching these dense and often daunting texts.

This book examines literary texts by British colonial servant and settler writers, including Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, William Golding, and Alan Sillitoe, who depicted the impact of decolonization in the newly independent colonies and at home in Britain. The end of the British Empire was one of the most significant and transformative events in twentieth-century history, marking the beginning of a new world order and having an indelible impact on British culture and society. Literary responses to this moment by those from within Britain offer an enlightening (and often overlooked) exploration of the influence of decolonization on received notions of “race” and class, while also prefiguring conceptions of multiculturalism. As Matthew Whittle argues in this sweeping study, these works not only view decolonization within its global context (alongside the aftermath of the Second World War, the rise of America, and mass immigration) but often propose a solution to imperial decline through cultural renewal.

This dissertation examines the early philosophical receptions to the work of Jacques Derrida, structuring the receptions in the form of an archive. The monograph is composed of three main sections: The Non-Locus of the Archive, The Derrida Archive, and Conclusion: The Margins of Philosophy. The Non-Locus of the Archive examines three ways of conceptualizing the archive: the archaeological or Foucauldian concept as a reaction to the traditional history of ideas, the traditional archive model Foucault attempts to replace, and a deconstructive model which is the first stage in critiquing this traditional/archaeological binary opposition. The Functions of the Derrida Archive are briefly introduced, and the whole issue of the philosophical receptions is related to Derrida's comments on "Colleges and Philosophy" and the essay "The Principle of Reason." The Derrida Archive is divided into Critical and Supporting Receptions. This is an analysis of the Functions that the monograph finds working

"The dissertation focuses on one of the most debated prophecies of Blake, The Four Zoas. The approach is basically psychological and, before the main thesis is elaborated, a brief survey is given about the most frequently studied parallels, such as Freud and Jung. The dissertation then proceeds to examine a new aspect: a parallel is drawn between the hypotheses of Lipot Szondi, disciple to Freud, and Blake's visionary universe. Szondi's System of Drives helps illuminate several questionable passages of Blake's dream vision, furthermore, as the parallel points out, an interesting change is discernible in Blake's concepts about Enlightenment and Rationalism, whereby the previously rejected ideas become integrated into a fourfold world of wholeness and intellectual sanity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia has directed attention toward the importance of utopianism. This book investigates the possibilities of cooperation between the humanities and the social sciences in the analysis of 20th century and contemporary utopian phenomena. The papers deal with major problems of interpreting utopias, the relationship of utopia and ideology, and the highly problematic issue as to whether utopia necessarily leads to dystopia. Besides reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary utopian investigations, the eleven essays effectively represent the constructive attitudes of utopian thought, a feature that not only defines late 20th- and 21st-century utopianism, but is one of the primary reasons behind the rising importance of the topic. The volume’s originality and value lies not only in the innovative theoretical approaches proposed, but also in the practical application of the concept of utopia to a variety of phenomena which have been neglected in the utopian studies paradigm, especially to the rarely discussed Central European texts and ideologies.