Cormac McCarthy: New Directions

✍ Scribed by James D. Lilley (editor)

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 362
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Contributors
Introduction: “There Was Map Enough for Men to Read”: Storytelling, the Border Trilogy, and New Directions • James D. Lilley
History and the Ugly Facts of Blood Meridian • Dana Phillips
The Lay of the Land in Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachia • K. Wesley Berry
The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian • Sara Spurgeon
History, Bloodshed, and the Spectacle of American Identity in Blood Meridian • Adam Parkes
Abjection and “the Feminine” in Outer Dark • Ann Fisher-Wirth
All the Pretty Mexicos: Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican Representations • Daniel Cooper Alarcón
“Blood is Blood”: All the Pretty Horses in the Multicultural Literature Class • Timothy P. Caron
The Cave of Oblivion: Platonic Mythology in Child of God • Dianne C. Luce
From Beowulf to Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy’s Demystification of the Martial Code • Rick Wallach
McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing • Edwin T. Arnold
“See the Child”: The Melancholy Subtext of Blood Meridian • George Guillemin
Leaving the Dark Night of the Lie: A Kristevan Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction • Linda Townley Woodson
“Hallucinated Recollections”: Narrative as Spatialized Perception of History in The Orchard Keeper • Matthew R. Horton
Cormac McCarthy’s Sense of an Ending: Serialized Narrative and Revision in Cities of the Plain • Robert L. Jarrett
Index