Politics and History in William Goldingprovides a much needed politicized and historicized reading of William Golding#x19;s novels as a counter to previous, universalizing criticism. Paul Crawford argues that an understanding of fantastic and carnivalesque modes in Golding#x19;s work is vital if we are to appreciate fully his interrogation of twentieth-century life. Golding#x19;s early satirical novels question English constructions of national identity in opposition to Nazism and the #x1C;totalitarian personality.#x1D; For Crawford, Golding can and must be studied in the wider European tradition of #x1C;literature of atrocity.#x1D; 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#x19;s later fiction, such as 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#x19;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#x19;s early and late fiction. No previous study has analyzed this structure that is so central to his work. Politics and History in William Goldingexamines this writer#x19;s work more fully than it has been studied within the convoluted context of the last half of the twentieth century. Crawford directly links Golding#x19;s various deployments of the fantastic and carnivalesque to historical, political, and social change.