Anthony Burgess and Modernism

Prof. Andrew Biswell - International Anthony Burgess Foundation (http://www2.mmu.ac.uk/english/staff/profile/index.php?id=1)

Abstract

In 1992 Anthony Burgess wrote a proposal for an unwritten book, ‘Modernism and Modern Man’. Burgess died the following year, but the proposal document offers a detailed statement about his thinking on modernism, not simply as a historical movement but as a continuous artistic project which was not yet complete.

Drawing on Burgess’s fiction and critical works, this paper seeks to position him as a late modernist novelist who worked self-consciously in the tradition of James Joyce. His critical writing on Joyce provides a set of interventions through which he articulated an ongoing dialogue with the high modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. In this non-fiction work, Burgess comes closest to making his literary aesthetic clear.

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Biography

Andrew Biswell is Professor of Modern Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) and Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.