Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction: tradition, modernism and William Golding. 2. Lord of the flies. 3. Pincher Martin: an appraisal of William Golding's "Pincher". 4. The Spire. 5. Darkness visible: Golding's visible darkness. 6. Rites of passage. 7. Conclusion: the ancient and the modern meet. Bibliography. Index.

"William Golding, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for fiction has reworked some of the finer traditions of the English Novel by using modes of the allegory, the fable and the myth, to reconstruct his own paradigms and references as a novelist. Golding's peculiar modernist burden lies in his myth making capacities; as also in his obsession with man in extremities, caught and entangled in 'good - and - evil' situations. Golding's inversion of the allegorical mode has neatly subverted tradition, in his rigorous quest to ask moral or religious questions. Golding's complexity as a novelist also lies in the fact that he cannot answer these questions.

The book deals with William Golding's aesthetics of fiction, his attributes as a novelist, singularly placing him in the cultural, social and literary contexts of tradition and modernity." (jacket)