Anthony Burgess And France

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.

Cet ouvrage aborde la relation particulière qu'Anthony Burgess - le célèbre écrivain britannique également compositeur de musique savante - avait avec la France. Burgess, qui reste encore aujourd'hui principalement connu du grand public pour son roman L'Orange mécanique adapté au cinéma par Stanley Kubrick, avait en effet parmi ses multiples centres d'intérêt, un penchant pour la France. Cet intérêt particulier, moins connu du grand public, se retrouve à plusieurs niveaux chez lui. Le présent ouvrage propose d'en illustrer quelques aspects parmi les plus représentatifs. Il y est question, entre autres, d'explorer l'impact du legs littéraire et musical français sur les créations et les adaptations d'Anthony Burgess. Des analyses détaillées présentent quelques-unes de ses oeuvres en référence à des écrivains français de premier plan tels que Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Lévi-Strauss, Molière et Rostand, ainsi que des compositeurs français de grand renom dont Berlioz, Bizet, Boulez, Debussy, Ravel et Saint-Saëns. Cet ouvrage est la version française du livre Anthony Burgess and France, publié chez Cambridge Scholars Publishing en 2011, à l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance d'Anthony Burgess.

Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called “elephantine fun” to write. A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon’s life into a pattern borrowed—in liberty, equality, and fraternity—from Beethoven’s Third “Eroica” Symphony, in this rich, exciting, bawdy, and funny novel Anthony Burgess has pulled out all the stops for a virtuoso performance that is literary, historical, and musical.

This book, taking an interdisciplinary approach, proposes a new insight into the relationship between literature and music through the prism of Anthony Burgessâ (TM)s works and those of his spiritual fathers, be they writers or composers. Exploring this relationship not only helps us to appreciate the complex mechanisms of certain artistic creations, but also demonstrates the parallels between these two major modes of artistic expression as well as showing the limits of trying to superimpose them. A selected panel of brilliant international scholars tackles the challenge of examining this relationship by providing original explanatory comments on the musicality of literature and the literary aspects of music. The book includes many pertinent references to a variety of artists ranging from musicians such as Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy to authors such as Joyce, Eliot and Huxley. Finally, it offers, through a wide spectrum of analyses, enrichment to scholars, students and general readers of the works of Burgess and of others in which literary and musical domains meet.

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.

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.

In characteristically daring style, Anthony Burgess combines two responses to Orwell's 1984 in one book. The first is a sharp analysis: through dialogues, parodies and essays, Burgess sheds new light on what he called 'an apocalyptic codex of our worst fears', creating a critique that is literature in its own right. Part two is Burgess' own dystopic vision, written in 1978. He skewers both the present and the future, describing a state where industrial disputes and social unrest compete with overwhelming surveillance, security concerns and the dominance of technology to make life a thing to be suffered rather than lived. Together these two works form a unique guide to one of the twentieth century's most talented, imaginative and prescient writers. Several decades later, Burgess' most singular work still stands.