Understanding Cormac McCarthy

✍ Scribed by Steven Frye

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 222
• Series: Understanding Contemporary American Literature
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of Cormac 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. He explores the early works of the Tennessee period in the context of the romance genre, the southern gothic, and the grotesque. 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. Frye also 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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Series Editor's Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Understanding Cormac McCarthy
Chapter 2. The Southern Works
Chapter 3. Into the West Blood Meridian
Chapter 4. The Border Trilogy
Chapter 5. The Later Works
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index