MUP

A Vision of Battlements is the first novel by the writer and composer Anthony Burgess, who was born in Manchester in 1917. Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, the book follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an army sergeant and incipient composer who dreams of composing great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war. Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from Virgil’s Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce’s Ulysses, a comic rewriting of a classical epic, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured.

The Irwell Edition is the first publication of Burgess’s forgotten masterpiece since 1965. This new edition includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, author of a prize-winning biography of Anthony Burgess.

ABBA ABBA is one of Anthony Burgess’s most original works, combining fiction, poetry and translation. A product of his time in Italy in the early 1970s, this delightfully unconventional book is part historical novel, part poetry collection, as well as a meditation on translation and the generating of literature by one of Britain’s most inventive post-war authors. Set in Papal Rome in the winter of 1820-21, Part One recreates the consumptive John Keats’s final months in the Eternal City and imagines his meeting the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. Pitting Anglo-Italian cultures and sensibilities against each other, Burgess creates a context for his highly original versions of 71 sonnets by Belli, which feature in Part Two.

This new edition includes extra material by Burgess, along with an introduction and notes by Paul Howard, Fellow in Italian Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Anthony Burgess draws upon an autobiographical episode to create Beard’s Roman Women, the story of a man haunted by his first wife, presumed dead. But is she? A marvellously economical book, full-flavoured, funny, and heartfelt, showing its author at the height of his powers. This new edition is the first to be published with David Robinson’s photographs for over forty years. The text of the novel has been restored using the original typescripts, and Graham Foster’s new introduction provides valuable insight into the fictional and biographical contexts of the novel. The text is fully annotated with a detailed set of notes and this edition includes the previously unpublished script for Burgess’s television film By the Waters of Leman: Byron and Shelley at Geneva, and a rare piece of Burgess’s writing about Rome.

Golden Mummies of Egypt presents new insights and a rich perspective on beliefs about the afterlife during an era when Egypt was part of the Greek and Roman worlds (c. 300 BCE–200 CE). This beautifully illustrated book, featuring photography by Julia Thorne, accompanies Manchester Museum’s first-ever international touring exhibition. Golden Mummies of Egypt is a visually spectacular exhibition that offers visitors unparalleled access to the museum’s outstanding collection of Egyptian and Sudanese objects – one of the largest in the UK.

This unique collection focuses on the work of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Written in the wake of the centenary of Bergman’s birth in 2018, the volume aims to combine new approaches to Bergman’s films and writings with more traditional analyses. Established themes such as Bergman’s interest in philosophy and psychology are addressed, but also less familiar topics, notably his relationship with Hollywood and his elaborate use of film music and autobiographical writing that characterised his later work. There are new analyses of aspects of Bergman’s most famous films, including Smiles of a Summer Night and Fanny and Alexander, but also insightful readings of lesser-known works, such as Saraband and Sawdust and Tinsel.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Comprised of fourteen chapters, the book opens with studies of Louis Feuillade, Jean Painlevé, Jean Vigo and Georges Franju. In each case the author finds original points of reference and cross-reference to other film-makers, and visual artists, particularly within modernism. Successful as free-standing short essays on their subject, the chapters also situate the work of these film-makers less within the context of French cinema history, than within other cinema histories and intellectual traditions. This is an important gesture both in terms of the general architecture of the book, and in terms of its commitment to reclaiming the work of these figures for a wide community of film and cinema studies teachers, students, and enthusiasts, particularly those interested in developing (or disagreeing with!) alternative approaches to the history and language of cinema. Undoubtedly, Intersections is a provocative and challenging read, but that does not make it any less urgent or necessary.

Winner of the 2019 Warburg Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities for an outstanding work of literary history

This is a study of the representation of witches in early modern English drama, organised around the themes of scepticism and belief. It covers the entire early modern period, including the Restoration, and pays particular attention to three plays in which witchcraft is central: The Witch of Edmonton (1621), The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) and The Lancashire Witches (1681). Always a controversial issue, witchcraft has traditionally been seen in terms of a debate between ‘sceptics’ and ‘believers’. This book argues instead that, while the concepts of scepticism and belief are central to an understanding of early modern witchcraft, they are more fruitfully understood not as static and mutually exclusive positions within the witchcraft debate, but as rhetorical tools used by both sides.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This novel is one of Anthony Burgess’s most accessible and entertaining works. By turns bawdy, raucous, tender and bittersweet, and full of music and songs, this is a warm and affectionate portrait of the working-class Lancashire of the 1920s and 1930s that he knew from his own early life.

The Pianoplayers is a funny, moving, autobiographical novel that brings to life the world of silent cinemas and music-halls of 1920s Manchester and Blackpool. Fully annotated and with a new introduction, this is an authoritative text for a new generation of readers.

Part of the forthcoming Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, this book offers an opportunity to reappraise an unjustly neglected novel important to our understanding of Burgess’s wider oeuvre. The 2017 Burgess centenary makes this a key moment for reflection on the life and work of a major figure in twentieth century letters.