Holloway (American Studies, U. of Derby, UK) employs the tools of contemporary theorists, particularly Fredric Jameson and his notion of transcoding, in this analysis of the writer and playwright. Among other issues, Holloway discusses the importance of class and capitalism for the theme of existential alienation experienced by McCarthy's characters. c. Book News Inc.

This book provides a sophisticated introduction to the life and work of Cormac McCarthy appropriate for scholars, teachers and general readers.

Cormac McCarthy’s work sounds warnings of impending apocalypse, but it also implies that redemption remains available. Nicholas Monk argues that McCarthy’s response to the modern world is more subtle and less laden with despair than many realize, and that his work represents an understanding of the world that transcends the political divisions of right and left, escapes the reductive nature of identity politics, and looks to futures beyond the immediately adjacent. He positions McCarthy as an acute chronicler of the American condition at the beginning of a new century. Tracing the development of modernity, Monk explores the associated political and philosophical undercurrents in McCarthy and identifies how they are generated and what they oppose. He focuses on language, aesthetics, violence, the spiritual, and the natural environment and the animals that inhabit it. He examines the experience of engaging with McCarthy’s fiction in order to reveal why so many people report that “reading Cormac McCarthy changed my life.”

This book addresses the religious scope of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, one of the most controversial issues in studies of his work. Current criticism is divided between those who find a theological dimension in his works, and those who reject such an approach on the grounds that the nihilist discourse characteristic of his narrative is incompatible with any religious message. McCarthy’s tendencies toward religious themes have become increasingly more acute, revealing that McCarthy has adopted the biblical language and rhetoric to compose an "apocryphal" narrative of the American Southwest while exploring the human innate tendency to evil in the line of Herman Melville and William Faulkner, both literary progenitors of the writer. Broncano argues that this apocryphal narrative is written against the background of the Bible, a peculiar Pentateuch in which Blood Meridian functions as the Book of Genesis, the Border Trilogy functions as the Gospels, and No Country for Old Men as the Book of Revelation, while The Road is the post-apocalyptic sequel. This book analyzes the novels included in what Broncano defines as the South-Western cycle (from Blood Meridian to The Road) in search of the religious foundations that support the narrative architecture of the texts.

Since World War II, the American West has become the nation’s military arsenal, proving ground, and disposal site. Through a wide-ranging discussion of recent literature produced in and about the West, Dirty Wars explores how the region’s iconic landscapes, invested with myths of national virtue, have obscured the West’s crucial role in a post–World War II age of “permanent war.” In readings of western—particularly southwestern—literature, John Beck provides a historically informed account of how the military-industrial economy, established to protect the United States after Pearl Harbor, has instead produced western waste lands and “waste populations” as the enemies and collateral casualties of a permanent state of emergency. Beck offers new readings of writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Rebecca Solnit, Julie Otsuka, and Terry Tempest Williams. He also draws on a variety of sources in history, political theory, philosophy, environmental studies, and other fields. Throughout Dirty Wars, he identifies resonances between different experiences and representations of the West that allow us to think about internment policies, the manufacture of atomic weapons, the culture of Cold War security, border policing, and toxic pollution as part of a broader program of a sustained and invasive management of western space.

"Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment establishes the centrality of Catholic thought, imagery, and sacrament both to the spiritual outlook of the McCarthy corpus and, more specifically, to its critique of Enlightenment values and their realization in American history. To this end, D. Marcel DeCoste surveys McCarthy's fiction from both his Tennessee and southwestern periods, with chapters devoted to eight of his published novels-from Outer Dark to The Road-and an introduction and coda that offer analyses of two of his dramatic works, along with his final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The argument advanced by DeCoste is twofold. First, his readings demonstrate that McCarthy's work mounts a sustained critique of core Enlightenment values and their bloody results in the American context. Second, he establishes that this critical engagement with American Enlightenment is one enabled by, and articulated through, specifically Catholic teachings on such topics as sacraments, ethics, and material creation. Though other studies trace how McCarthy's fiction dissects such American myths as radical individualism and Manifest Destiny, they do not, at the same time, take up the question of how the fiction's spiritual interests and obtrusive Christian symbolism relate to this critical project. More than merely calling attention to McCarthy's own religious background or his drawing on sacramental language, DeCoste examines the significance of Catholicism to the author's depictions not just of religion and ethics, but of the modernity many critics see McCarthy as critiquing. Throughout Professing Darkness, DeCoste offers extended analysis of McCarthy's engagement with American history and myth, early modern and Enlightenment thought, and Catholic theology, ethics, and sacramentalism"--

Increasing specialization within the discipline of English and American Studies has shifted the focus of scholarly discussion toward theoretical reflection and cultural contexts. These developments have benefitted the discipline in more ways than one, but they have also resulted in a certain neglect of close reading. As a result, students and researchers interested in such material are forced to turn to scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s, much of which relies on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions. The handbook aims to fill this gap by providing new readings of texts that figure prominently in the literature classroom and in scholarly debate − from James’s The Ambassadors to McCarthy’s The Road. These readings do not revert naively to a time “before theory.” Instead, they distil the insights of literary and cultural theory into concise introductions to the historical background, the themes, the formal strategies, and the reception of influential literary texts, and they do so in a jargon-free language accessible to readers on all levels of qualification.

In its more than three decades of existence, the discipline of American studies has been reliably unreliable, its boundaries and assumptions forever shifting as it continuously repositions itself to better address the changing character of American life, literature, and culture. American Mythologies is a challenging new look at the current reinvention of American studies, a reinvention that has questioned the whole notion of what "American"—let alone "American studies"—means. Essays in the collection range widely in considering these questions, from the effect of Muhammad Ali on Norman Mailer's writings about boxing to the interactions of myth and memory in the fictions of Jayne Anne Phillips to the conflicted portrayal of the American West in Cormac McCarthy's novels. Four essays in the collection focus on Native American authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor, while another considers Louise Erdrich's novels in the context of Ojibwa myth. By bringing together perspectives on American studies from both Europe and America, American Mythologies provides a clear picture of the current state of the discipline while pointing out fruitful directions for its future.

Presents a collection of critical essays about the works of Cormac McCarthy.

"No More Heroes" directly addresses the essential question about McCarthy's morally ambiguous and apocalyptic world, revealing poignant, new answers that will enlighten critics and general readers alike. Cooper evaluates all of McCarthy's work to date, carefully exploring the range of his narrative techniques to reveal rare but powerful moments of internal yearnings, and commitment to justice or compassion that separate McCarthy's work from absolute amorality. Cooper shows that there does exist a strain of heroism in the otherwise brutal universe of Cormac McCarthy's work.