Myth, Legend, Dust

Myth, Legend, Dust
Author: Rick Wallach
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780719059483

For almost three decades, Cormac McCarthy solidified his reputation as an American "writer's writer" with remarkable novels such as his Appalachian Tales, The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and his terrifying Western masterpiece, Blood Meridian. Then, with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, the first work of his celebrated Border Trilogy in 1992, McCarthy's popularity exploded on to a world stage. As his reputation burgeoned with the publications of The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, the critical response to McCarthy has grown apace.

Gods and the Dust

Gods and the Dust
Author: Joshua Rivoli
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781720688242

Greek mythology is stranger than you might think. Gods and the Dust collects numerous stories from the ancient source material and strings them together into one fluid plot, fleshing out the sparse details into a dramatic fantasy novel. At the dawn of time, the Earth and Sky mated to populate the world. Their most powerful children are the gods and goddesses - living personifications of all things great and small, physical and conceptual. These powerful deities engage in an interconnected string of relationships and misadventures involving mortals and immortals, dispensing wrath and favor in equal measure, resulting in murders, love affairs, offspring, and wars.

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy
Author: Markus Wierschem
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2024-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609177509

This definitive assessment of Cormac McCarthy’s novels captures the interactions among the literary and mythic elements, the social dynamics of violence, and the natural world in The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, and The Road. Elegantly written and deeply engaged with previous scholarship as well as interviews with the novelist, this study provides a comprehensive introduction to McCarthy’s work while offering an insightful new analysis. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic theory, mythography, thermodynamics, and information science, Markus Wierschem identifies a literary apocalypse at the center of McCarthy’s work, one that unveils another buried deep within the history, religion, and myths of American and Western culture.

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy
Author: Sara Spurgeon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2011-06-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441193006

A collection of original, stimulating interpretations of key texts by Cormac McCarthy, designed for students and edited and written by leading scholars in the field

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy
Author: Erik Hage
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2010-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786455594

Cormac McCarthy, the author of such works as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, is one of America's greatest living writers--an uncompromising examiner of the depths of human depravity, the nature of evil, and the bonds that endure. This companion is intended for both the scholar and lay reader seeking a comprehensive understanding of McCarthy's body of work. Alphabetically ordered entries offer analysis of novels, characters, motifs, allusions, plays, and themes, as well as commentary on events, people and places related to McCarthy scholarship. Most entries include a selected bibliography for further reading. A biographical introduction provides information on the life of this reclusive author, and discussion topics are provided as an aid for instructors.

No Place for Home

No Place for Home
Author: Jay Ellis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135513368

This book was written to venture beyond interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and always emotionally isolated and socially detached characters. As McCarthy usually eschews direct indications of psychology, his landscapes allow us to infer much about their motivations. The relationship of ambivalent nostalgia for domesticity to McCarthy's descriptions of space remains relatively unexamined at book length, and through less theoretical application than close reading. By including McCarthy's latest book, this study offer the only complete study of all nine novels. Within McCarthy studies, this book extends and complicates a growing interest in space and domesticity in his work. The author combines a high regard for McCarthy's stylistic prowess with a provocative reading of how his own psychological habits around gender issues and family relations power books that only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, expressions of misogynistic fear, or antinomian rejections of civilized life.

Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy

Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy
Author: Christopher Eagle
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317435303

This book is the first edited collection to explore the role of philosophy in the works of Cormac McCarthy, significantly expanding the scope of philosophical inquiry into McCarthy’s writings. There is a strong and growing interest amongst philosophers in the relevance of McCarthy’s writings to key debates in contemporary philosophy, for example, debates on trauma and violence, on the relationship between language and world, and the place of the subject within history, temporality, and borders. To this end, the contributors to this collection focus on how McCarthy’s writings speak to various philosophical themes, including violence, war, nature, history, materiality, and the environment. Emphasizing the form of McCarthy’s texts, the chapters attend to the myriad ways in which his language effects a philosophy of its own, beyond the thematic content of his narratives. Bringing together scholars in contemporary philosophy and McCarthy Studies, and informed by the release of the Cormac McCarthy Papers, the volume reflects on the theoretical relationship between philosophical thinking and literary form. This book will appeal to all scholars working in the rapidly-growing field of McCarthy Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and to philosophers working on a wide range of problems in ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Film across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy.

Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament

Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament
Author: Matthew L. Potts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 150133073X

"Reconceives the moral significance of Cormac McCarthy's novels through a constructive engagement with postmodern theory and Christian theology"--