Politics and history in William Golding : the world turned upside down
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Politics and history in William Golding : the world turned upside down
University of Missouri Press, c2002
Available at 16 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-254) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Provides a politicized and historicized reading of William Golding's novels as a counter to previous, universalizing criticism. Paul Crawford here argues that an understanding of fantastic and carnivalesque modes in Golding's work is vital if we are to appreciate fully his interrogation of 20th-century life. Golding's early satirical novels question English constructions of national identity in opposition to Nazism and the ""totalitarian personality"". For Crawford, Golding can and must be studied in the wider European tradition of ""literature of atrocity"". His early novels, especially ""Lord of the Flies"", are preoccupied with atrocity, whereas the later work betrays a greater concern for the status of language and literature. In Golding's later fiction, like ""Darkness Visible"", the fantastic and carnivalesque are used in an increasingly nonsatirical manner to complement first modernist and then postmodernist self-consciousness and indeterminacy. Even his critique of class and religious authority, which carries through all of his fiction, gives way to more lighthearted productions - a symptom of which is his crude, absurd attack against the English literary industry in ""The Paper Men"". This reduction of satire marks a decline in Golding's political commitment and the production of more complex and arguably less satisfying novels. The fantastic and carnivalesque are foundational to both the satirical and nonsatirical approaches that mark Golding's early and late fiction. Crawford directly links Golding's various deployments of the fantastic and carnivalesque to historical, political, and social change.
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