Authority and the Mountaineer in Cormac McCarthy's Appalachia

Authority and the Mountaineer in Cormac McCarthy's Appalachia PDF Author: Gabe Rikard
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786474599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The author uses theories on power, resistance and discipline developed by Michel Foucault to analyze the interactions of mountaineers and the authorities who have attempted to "modernize" them. The book shows how McCarthy manipulates Appalachian images while engaging in a form of archeology of Appalachian constructs. Initially the book explores the interplay of the dominance/resistance duality. Roads provided ways into the mountains for industry and ways out for the mountaineer, cotton mill villages and regional cities served as "disciplined" destinations for Appalachian out-migrants. McCarthy's character Lester Ballard (Child of God) represents the epitome of hillbilly delinquency. The author explains how the iconic image of the mountaineer--a notion cultivated by fiction writers, benevolent organizations, and academics--"othered" the mountain people as deviants. The book ends by considering the ways in which The Road returns to the rhetorical and geographical region of his early work, and how it fits into McCarthy's Appalachian oeuvre.

Authority and the Mountaineer in Cormac McCarthy's Appalachia

Authority and the Mountaineer in Cormac McCarthy's Appalachia PDF Author: Gabe Rikard
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786474599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The author uses theories on power, resistance and discipline developed by Michel Foucault to analyze the interactions of mountaineers and the authorities who have attempted to "modernize" them. The book shows how McCarthy manipulates Appalachian images while engaging in a form of archeology of Appalachian constructs. Initially the book explores the interplay of the dominance/resistance duality. Roads provided ways into the mountains for industry and ways out for the mountaineer, cotton mill villages and regional cities served as "disciplined" destinations for Appalachian out-migrants. McCarthy's character Lester Ballard (Child of God) represents the epitome of hillbilly delinquency. The author explains how the iconic image of the mountaineer--a notion cultivated by fiction writers, benevolent organizations, and academics--"othered" the mountain people as deviants. The book ends by considering the ways in which The Road returns to the rhetorical and geographical region of his early work, and how it fits into McCarthy's Appalachian oeuvre.

Dissertation Abstracts International

Dissertation Abstracts International PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description


Appalachian Journal

Appalachian Journal PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Appalachian Region, Southern
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
A regional studies review.

The United States of Appalachia

The United States of Appalachia PDF Author: Jeff Biggers
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 158243994X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Few places in the United States confound and fascinate Americans like Appalachia, yet no other area has been so markedly mischaracterized by the mass media. Stereotypes of hillbillies and rednecks repeatedly appear in representations of the region, but few, if any, of its many heroes, visionaries, or innovators are ever referenced. Make no mistake, they are legion: from Anne Royall, America's first female muckraker, to Sequoyah, a Cherokee mountaineer who invented the first syllabary in modern times, and international divas Nina Simone and Bessie Smith, as well as writers Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, and Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck, Appalachia has contributed mightily to American culture — and politics. Not only did eastern Tennessee boast the country's first antislavery newspaper, Appalachians also established the first District of Washington as a bold counterpoint to British rule. With humor, intelligence, and clarity, Jeff Biggers reminds us how Appalachians have defined and shaped the United States we know today.

The Cratis Williams Symposium Proceedings

The Cratis Williams Symposium Proceedings PDF Author: Barry M. Buxton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description


Appalachian Portraits

Appalachian Portraits PDF Author: Lee Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description


Understanding Cormac McCarthy

Understanding Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Steven Frye
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611172047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
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.

Landscape Of Desire

Landscape Of Desire PDF Author: Greg Gordon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Each chapter focuses on a geological formation the group descends through, but plant and animal life, ecology, human impacts, and the students' experience and learning are all tightly woven into Gordon's reflections and storytelling, which create a powerful documentation and celebration of place and the evolutions that occur when human beings connect intimately to their surroundings."--BOOK JACKET.

The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy

The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Vereen M. Bell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807181358
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
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.

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Erik Hage
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786455594
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
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.