Anthony Burgess and America: Responses to the Culture and Politics of the United States of America in the Novels and Nonfiction of Anthony Burgess

Thurley, Christopher Wayne (2022) Anthony Burgess and America: Responses to the Culture and Politics of the United States of America in the Novels and Nonfiction of Anthony Burgess. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

John Burgess Wilson, known as Anthony Burgess, was closely engaged with American culture from the late 1960s up until his death in 1993. Burgess travelled extensively in the United States for lecture tours, professorships, visiting author positions, book tours, and other artistic engagements. This dissertation undertakes the first analysis of surviving materials (archived documents, audio recordings, unpublished letters, and journalism) and reveals that Burgess’s post-1960s literary work is closely tied up with his American experiences. These documents add a new layer to his work and expose the key inspirations of three Burgess novels with North American settings: M/F (1971), The Clockwork Testament; Or Enderby’s End (1974), and Enderby’s Dark Lady; or, No End to Enderby (1984). Addressing an aspect of Burgess’s life which has not previously been explored in detail, this dissertation delves into Burgess’s experiences in America between the late 1960s and early 1990s, and, in the process, has amassed an entirely new collection of American cultural materials pertinent to Burgess which have been catalogued here in an extensive bibliography and briefly displayed in a timeline. Anthony Burgess and America offers the first critical account of the American influences on Burgess’s career, life, fiction, and nonfiction, and is entirely original in theoretical approach. Examining Burgess’s writings about obscenity, pornography, censorship, race, class, higher education, pedagogy, literary theory, aesthetics, literature, and writing over the last thirty years of his life allows this dissertation to analyse Burgess’s fiction and other work in new and crucial ways. In understanding his view of America, a vision emerges of Burgess as an author profoundly inspired and influenced by the United States, and as an engaged cultural critic and commentator. The arguments that follow confirm that America became to Burgess not simply a foreign country to be used as a backdrop for literature, but rather a defining place which shaped and influenced the development of his creative work. Predominately utilizing principals pulled from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories and work concerning novelistic language and the idea of philosophic anthropology, claims are made concerning Burgess’s heteroglossic monologism and authorial dialogism, as it occurs throughout these novels with his published and unpublished oeuvre. In doing so, what appears is substantial evidence that helps designate the novels chosen for this dissertation as kinds of culturally-influenced autobiografiction that require theoretical support from Max Saunders findings in his Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (2010). When paratextual (epi-and-peritextual) elements of Burgess’s life and works are assessed in conjunction with his fiction, to gauge the possible influences, tenets set forth by Gérard Genette in his Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987) help further support arguments about Burgess’s peculiar and particularly American kind of parodic, public self-stylization that occurs both within and outside of his novels. Many of such interpretations are evidenced by his fictional use of American narrators, settings, thematic materials, and American characters and speech. All of these American elements and refracted heteroglossic voices, analysed and assessed through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of philosophical anthropology and dialogic, are seen to be in close dialogue and commentary with the rest of Burgess’s fiction and nonfiction.