Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Golding, William (Vol. 17) - Christopher Ricks

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CHRISTOPHER RICKS

[The Hot Gates is art because Golding's] talents simply are not for those matters which aptly fashion themselves into 'occasional pieces': trips to America, reviews of books about otters and headmasters, and potted-boilers on Copernicus. Mr. Golding goes through the Copernican motions. Just occasionally something from the world of the novels brings life with it…. Mr. Golding's imagination is kindled by fantasy as it hardly is by fact—at least, not the brochure-type facts about Stratford-upon-Avon or the stale news about Creative Writing courses which are trotted out in this book. Sententious, over-written, trivial and lumpishly jocose, much of this volume stands to the novels as did that inept play The Brass Butterfly….

Still, even if most of these essays are intrinsically slight, a good deal of extrinsic interest accrues to them. Mr. Golding's novels are certainly not slight, and whenever a filament reaches to the novels...

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1. Introduction
2. Louis J. Halle
3. James Stern
4. John Peter
5. Norman Podhoretz
6. V. S. Pritchett
7. Frank Kermode
8. Mary Renault
9. Peter Green
10. C. B. Cox
11. Michael Quinn
12. Terry Southern
13. Frank J. Warnke
14. V. S. Pritchett
15. Nigel Dennis
16. Frank Kermode
17. William Barrett
18. R. C. Townsend
19. Gladys Veidemanis
20. James R. Baker
21. Christopher Ricks
22. J. D. O'Hara
23. Harry H. Taylor
24. D. W. Crompton
25. Roderick Nordell
26. David Spitz
27. Stanley Cook
28. James R. Baker
29. P. N. Furbank
30. A. C. Capey
31. James Acheson
32. Ronald Blythe
33. Paul Ableman
34. John Calvin Batchelor
35. Joyce Carol Oates
36. Copyright

1. William Golding