A Clockwork Orange Summary
Anthony Burgess

Biography EssayWidely regarded as one of the foremost contemporary fiction writers in English, Anthony Burgess began his long and prolific literary career while living in Malaya during the late 1950s.... Read more

Anthony Burgess was a British writer of enormous powers and capacity. Starting his writing career at age forty-two, he was still able to create over fifty books of fiction, criticism, essays, and tran... Read more

Widely regarded as one of the foremost contemporary fiction writers in English, Anthony Burgess began his long and prolific literary career while living in Malaya during the late 1950s. In 1949 he had... Read more

(This entry was updated by Geoffrey Aggeler (University of Utah) from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 3-35.)The literary career of John Anthony Burgess... Read more

Mitchell is an English novelist, playwright, and critic. In the following positive review, he lauds A Clockwork Orange as a brilliant mixture of horror and farce, calling Burgess's use of langu... Read more

McCracken is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, he argues against interpreting A Clockwork Orange as a didactic novel concerning free will, taking issue specifically with Burgess... Read more

In the following essay, Carson argues that pronoun usage in A Clockwork Orange is indicative of the power relationships between Alex and the other characters. What discussion there has been of the ... Read more

In the following essay, Rabinovitz comments on Burgess's presentation in A Clockwork Orange of the notion of "social history as a cyclical alternation" of diametrically opposed vi... Read more

In the following essay, Bowie compares the thematic treatment of freedom and beauty in A Clockwork Orange and in works by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In 1961 Anthony Burgess interrupted his work on A Clockw... Read more

In the following essay, which takes the form of an interview conducted by Burgess with Alex, the main character of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess examines Alex's personality by having him critique... Read more

Barricelli is an American fiction writer, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, he argues that the use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in A Clockwork Orange is arbitrary and inappropria... Read more

In the following essay, Hutchings discusses the stage adaptations of A Clockwork Orange, focusing on the two written by Burgess. Since its publication in 1962, A Clockwork Orange has remained Antho... Read more

Pritchard is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he discusses the effect of Burgess's invented language, "nadsat," on the violent content of A Clockwork Ora... Read more

Evans is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, he discusses the use of the "nadsat" slang in A Clockwork Orange, and its effect upon the novel as a dystopian vision. ... Read more

In the following essay, Burgess discusses the violence in A Clockwork Orange and reacts to criticism that both the novel and Stanley Kubrick's 1972 film version of it are gratuitous in their de... Read more

In the following essay, Cullinan discusses the effect of the final, twenty-first, chapter of A Clockwork Orange, which was left out of the original American editions. American readers of A Clockwor... Read more

An exploration of how Anthony Burgess uses style, structure and language to reveal the characteristics of the protagonist, Alex, in "A Clockwork Orange." I was first attracted to "A Clockwork Orang... Read more

Karma is a major aspect of the Hindu religion. It is primarily based on the idea that "what ever goes around comes around", perhaps the most over used cliché known to human kind. The irony in thi... Read more

I was first attracted to "A Clockwork Orange" when it was featured as one of the "top 100 films of all-time" in a magazine. I subsequently expressed a desire to read the novel but was advised against ... Read more