SOURCE: "Dystopias and Cacotopias," in Anthony Burgess Revisited, Twayne, 1991, pp. 47-63.

Stinson is an educator and critic specializing in modern British literature who has spent many years studying the work of Burgess. In the following excerpt, he discusses themes and stylistic aspects of A Clockwork Orange, and comments on the history of the major critical issues involved with the novel.

Any reasonably informed discussion of utopian and antiutopian fiction in our own century must soon involve the names of H. G. Wells and George Orwell. Wells, the cheerful apostle of rationalism, scientism, and technology, believed that the world's people, all basically benevolent by innate disposition, could, at some sufficient point of general enlightenment, produce a New Jerusalem on this earth. Wells believed, as Burgess writes in The Novel Now, that "there was no such thing as Original Sin; man was born free to build good—not to earn...