Mapping the Boundaries of Domestic and International Criminal Jurisdiction in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: Integrating Doctrinal Legal Analysis and Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is often read as an allegory of failed civilization. Its violence also raises a narrower legal question: what survives of criminal jurisdiction when public power is physically absent? This study combines doctrinal legal analysis with corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the novel’s language. The primary corpus is a digital edition of the novel, divided into twelve chapter-documents across three narrative phases and comprising 60,573 raw tokens, reduced to 21,637 content tokens after normalisation, stop-word removal and lemmatization. Frequency, TF-IDF, cosine similarity, discourse salience, and a weighted Composite Chapter Score direct, rather than confirm, a qualitative reading. Coercive-authority language rises from 3.407 markers per 1,000 content tokens in the first phase to 16.411 in the last; tribe moves from zero occurrences to 40, while accountability terms remain lexically marginal throughout. The doctrinal analysis, however, resists a simple transfer from failed local order to international prosecution. Using contemporary England and Wales law as a comparator, homicide committed abroad, attempt, and secondary liability offer plausible domestic routes, subject to proof of nationality, age, conduct and intent. By contrast, the Rome Statute imposes cumulative subject-matter, temporal, territorial, admissibility and gravity constraints, together with Article 26’s categorical exclusion of persons under eighteen from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. These apparently conflicting findings take the form of an asymmetrical jurisdictional limit: the absence of institutions increases violence but does not convert an interpersonal crime into an international one, while international human-rights law mainly constrains how any domestic accountability process treats a child.