University of Kent Library (PhD Thesis)

Anthony Levings, 'The Public Personage as Protagonist in the Novels of Anthony Burgess', PhD Thesis (Canterbury: University of Kent, 2007). Library Record

When Anthony Burgess began writing novels that contained public personages as protagonists (Nothing Like the Sun, MF, Napoleon Symphony, ABBA ABBA, Earthly Powers, The End of the World News, Mozart and the Wolf Gang, A Dead Man in Deptford) in the latter half of the twentieth century, the challenge was to move away from (or re-manipulate) modernism but at the same time avoid a straightforward return to nineteenth-century (historical) realism. However, recognition and understanding of the way in which history is incorporated into the novel has changed dramatically over the last four decades. Burgess must now be read not only against earlier novelists, theorists and philosophers (particular examples being James Joyce, Roland Barthes and Kant), but also against a whole body of work by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, John Banville and Günter Grass, as well as theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, Hayden White, Thomas M. Greene and, once again, Umberto Eco, to name but a few. For these writers have pushed the boundaries of how history is now understood in terms of the novel.