The Dialectics of Control: A New Historicist Excavation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange

Emerging to challenge formalist and traditional historical criticism, New Historicism demands that literary works be analyzed within their complex socio-historical contexts, rejecting the notion of the autonomous aesthetic text. This article employs this interdisciplinary lens to excavate Anthony Burgess’s controversial ۱۹۶۲ novel, A Clockwork Orange. It argues that the novel’s dystopian vision of a youth culture addicted to ultraviolence and a state deploying oppressive behavioral conditioning functions not as mere speculative fantasy but as a critical interrogation of post-war Britain’s deepest anxieties. By situating Burgess’s work within the precise historical crucible of the Cold War, burgeoning consumer capitalism, a crisis in political authority, and the rising influence of Skinnerian behaviorism, this analysis demonstrates how the novel refracts the period’s pervasive cultural tensions. Ultimately, this study contends that A Clockwork Orange is a seminal document of its time, a symbolic act that absorbs and artistically transforms the very real discourses of social control, moral panic, and ideological conflict that defined the early ۱۹۶۰s.

کلیدواژه ها:

A Clockwork Orange ، Anthony Burgess ، Context ، New Historicism