The Coincidence Of Opposites: William Golding's Later Fiction

Synopsis

The principal assertion of The Coincidence of Opposites is that all of William Golding's later fiction (from Darkness Visible to Fire Down Below) moves towards a state of synthesis, a denial of distinctions, which the author achieves through the reconciliation of ostensibly antithetical positions. Throughout this sequence of novels it is consistently implied that apparently intractable polarities have no genuine a priori existence. McCarron's study is both thoretically inflected and heavily interdisciplinary, incorporating philosophy, sociology, anthropology and theology, in addition to literary theory.