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Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’ A Document of Disintegration between the Traditional British Culture and the Rise of a New Youth Culture

Abstract

Anthony Burgess, a British novelist, essayist, semanticist, translator and critic, who authored more than 50 books. “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) is considered as his best work in which he portrayed the disintegration between the traditional British culture and the youth culture, which produced violence and perversity. This youth culture started pervading the layers of the traditional British culture. The 1960s found the British culture assuming a distorted shape both in values and norms. The post war generation had to peep into the collapsed world from a perspective quite different from the previous one, because of the rising tension emerging out of a new threat from the nuclear war hanging overhead. This paper seeks to explore the disintegration between the newly emerging culture and the traditional British culture and its effect upon the young generation, which brought about chaos and disorders in British society.