The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy

The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy
Author: Vereen M. Bell
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2023-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807181358

Now back in print, Vereen M. Bell's The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy was the first critical book devoted to an author who would become one of the most celebrated American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Published in 1988, before McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and had his novels adapted into acclaimed films, Bell's study offered the first systematic review of the author's work. According to Bell, part of the difficulty of analyzing McCarthy's fiction is that the novelist by design works against all conventional ways of seeing and dealing with the world. Any formulaic readings, particularly those associated with the traditional schemes of southern literature, will be distorted. McCarthy's novels are provocatively mysterious yet specific and vivid as well. They are also freestanding and unclassifiable Bell shows how McCarthy transforms the world through language, how he reconstitutes both urban and rural settings so that otherwise barely articulate and unheroic people live vividly in a context that is both modernist and antimodernist. In this respect, Bell argues, McCarthy's work is about the tension between visions of the world and the intractable, opposing materiality of it, between the mysteriousness of an individual's private engagement with experience and social normality's tendency to flatten it out. At the same time, Bell shows McCarthy's infatuation with the reality of evil, how the evil in human form in his novels is as inexplicably gratuitous and violent as the inhuman form of random and destructive natural events. Such violence, for McCarthy, is built into existence and cannot be evaded or rationalized away. With detailed readings of McCarthy's first five novels—The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian—Bell demonstrates the novelist's faith in the protean capacity of language to disclose the layered possibilities and richness of being. Widely cited by scholars, Bell's book established many of the foundational critical frameworks for approaching McCarthy's work. It is now available in an affordable paperback edition.

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2010-08-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307762521

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

The Road

The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2007-03-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307267458

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). • From the bestselling author of The Passenger A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy
Author: James D. Lilley
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2014-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826327680

Even before Harold Bloom designated Blood Meridian as the Great American Novel, Cormac McCarthy had attracted unprecedented attention as a novelist who is both serious and successful, a rare combination in recent American fiction. Critics have been quick to address McCarthy’s indebtedness to southern literature, Christianity, and existential thought, but the essays in this collection are among the first to tackle such issues as gender and race in McCarthy’s work. The rich complexity of the novels leaves room for a wide variety of interpretation. Some of the contributors see racist attitudes in McCarthy’s views of Mexico, whereas others praise his depiction of U.S.-Mexican border culture and contact. Several of the essays approach McCarthy’s work from the perspective of ecocriticism, focusing on his representations of the natural world and the relationships that his characters forge with their geographical environments. And by exploring the author’s use of and attitudes toward language, some of the contributors examine McCarthy’s complex and innovative storytelling techniques.

Understanding Cormac McCarthy

Understanding Cormac McCarthy
Author: Steven Frye
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2012-08-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611172047

A roadmap to the dark and mythic topography of McCarthy's fiction Named by Harold Bloom as one of the most significant American novelists of our time, Cormac McCarthy has been honored with the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, and the coveted MacArthur Fellowship. Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of McCarthy's fiction to date, dealing with the author's aesthetic and thematic concerns, his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation in Western literary traditions. Frye provides extensive readings of each novel, charting the trajectory of McCarthy's development as a writer who invigorates literary culture both past and present through a blend of participation, influence, and aesthetic transformation. Understanding Cormac McCarthy explores the early works of the Tennessee period in the context of the "romance" genre, the southern gothic and grotesque, as well as the carnivalesque. A chapter is devoted to Blood Meridian, a novel that marks McCarthy's transition to the West and his full recognition as a major force in American letters. In the final two chapters, Frye explores McCarthy's Border Trilogy and his later works— specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road—addressing the manner in which McCarthy's preoccupation with violence and human depravity exists alongside a perpetual search for meaning, purpose, and value. Frye provides scholars, students, and general readers alike with a clearly argued foundational examination of McCarthy's novels in their historical and literary contexts as an ideal roadmap illuminating the author's work as it charts the dark and mythic topography of the American frontier.

The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy

The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy
Author: Georg Guillemin
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2004-06-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781585443413

Georg Guillemin’s visionary approach to the work of Western novelist Cormac McCarthy combines an overall survey of McCarthy’s eight novels in print with a comprehensive analysis of the author’s evolving ecopastoralism. Using in-depth textual interpretations, Guillemin argues that even McCarthy’s early work is characterized less by traditional nostalgia for a lost pastoral order than by a radically egalitarian land ethic that prefigures today’s ecopastoral tendencies in Western American writing. The study shows that more than any of the other landscapes evoked by McCarthy, the Southwestern desert becomes the stage for his dramatizations of a wild sense of the pastoral. McCarthy’s fourth novel, Suttree, which is the only one set inside an urban environment, is used in the introductory chapter to discuss the relevant compositional aspects of his fiction and the methodology of the chapters to come. The main part of the study devotes chapters to McCarthy’s Southern novels, his keystone work Blood Meridian, and the Western novels known as the Border Trilogy. The concluding chapter discusses the broader context of American pastoralism and suggests that McCarthy’s ecopastoralism is animistic rather than environmentalist in character. Guillemin shows that the very popular Border Trilogy takes McCarthy’s ecopastoralism to its culmination, although this is often overlooked precisely because of the simplicity of the plots—picaresque quests. As the trilogy arranges its plots as a search for a life of pastoral harmony (All the Pretty Horses), envisions a nomadic version of pastoral (The Crossing), and experiences the foreclosure of the pastoral vision anywhere (Cities of the Plain), the trilogy as a whole tacitly acknowledges the obsolescence of utopian pastoralism. Increasingly, man ceases to be the dominant focus of narration, so that the shift from an egocentric to an ecocentric sense of self marks both the heroes and narrators of McCarthy’s novels.

Child of God

Child of God
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2010-08-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307762483

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • In this taut, chilling story, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. "Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

A Cormac Mccarthy Companion

A Cormac Mccarthy Companion
Author: Edwin T. Arnold
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2009-09-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781604735819

The first book to examine McCarthya s three masterpiece novels as a cohesive whole"