POLITICS AND HISTORY IN WILLIAM GOLDING by Paul Crawford ( 9780826214164 )

Item Details

Title:

POLITICS AND HISTORY IN WILLIAM GOLDING
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£59.00
We currently do not stock this item, please contact the publisher directly for further information.

ISBN 10:

0826214169

ISBN 13:

9780826214164

Publisher:

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

Pub. date:

31 October, 2002

Pages:

288

Description:

Provides a politicized and historicized reading of William Golding's novels. 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.

Synopsis:

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.

Illustrations:

bibliography, index

Publication:

Imprint:

University of Missouri Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

CABIN FEVER

COMMUNICATING AS A MENTAL HEALTH CARER (PB)

COMMUNICATING CARE (PB)

EVIDENCE BASED RESEARCH (HB)