A Vision of Battlements

A Vision of Battlements is a 1965 novel by Anthony Burgess based on his experiences during World War II in Gibraltar, where he was serving with the British army. It is Burgess's first novel:[1] while it was not published until 1965, Burgess wrote it in 1949. As he explained in his introduction to the novel, "I was empty of music but itching to create. So I wrote this novel ... to see if I could clear my head of the dead weight of Gibraltar."[2]

A Vision of Battlements
First edition
AuthorAnthony Burgess
IllustratorEdward Pagram
PublishedSidgwick & Jackson: London, 1965
Pages265
OCLC559438259

Plot

The story draws from Burgess's experience of being stationed in Gibraltar during the Second World War and satirises traditional notions of battle heroism by parodying the Aeneid. The antihero Richard Ennis takes the place of Aeneas.[3][4]

The title, in addition to its Gibraltarian associations, contains a reference to the appearance of certain objects in the eye of one who suffers from astigmatism.

References
  1. Nichol, Donald (August 1989). ""Flagrant" versus "Fragrant" in Beaumont, Pope, Pound, and Burgess". Modern Philology. 87 (1): 76–82. doi:10.1086/391749.
  2. Burgess, Anthony (1965). A Vision of Battlements. Norton. pp. 7–8.
  3. Burgess, Anthony; Charles T. Bunting (Winter 1973). "A "Studies in the Novel" Interview: An interview in New York with Anthony Burgess". Studies in the Novel. 4 (4): 504–529.
  4. Ziolkowski, Theodore (Spring 2000). "The Fragmented Text: The Classics and Postwar European Literature". International Journal of the Classical Tradition. 6 (4): 549–562. doi:10.1007/bf02907070.


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