Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road PDF Author: Julian Murphet
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441185054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This collection shows how Cormac McCarthy's The Road reacts aesthetically to many of the ethical, ontological, and political concerns that define our times.

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road PDF Author: Julian Murphet
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441185054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This collection shows how Cormac McCarthy's The Road reacts aesthetically to many of the ethical, ontological, and political concerns that define our times.

The Road

The Road PDF Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage Books
ISBN: 0307386457
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity

Unguessed Kinships

Unguessed Kinships PDF Author: Steven Frye
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 081736109X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
"It took six novels and nearly thirty years for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success as a writer with the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses coming twenty-seven years after his debut. The second half of his long career brought major prizes, more bestsellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work. The sharp upturn in McCarthy's readership, especially with the genre exercises No Country for Old Men and The Road, has obscured his commitment to a decidedly old-fashioned style of literature: naturalism. It is hardly a secret that McCarthy's work tends to darker themes: violence, brutality, warfare, the cruel indifference of nature. There is a bright line running from some of the core texts of literary naturalism in those themes, which would not be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But literary naturalism is much more than the oversimplified Darwinism that we often think of. Nature may well be red in tooth and claw, and humans are part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature was capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality in addition to atavism and monstrosity. That is the naturalism that comes across in McCarthy's oeuvre. In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye complicates our understanding of literary naturalism through a chronological treatment of McCarthy's body of work. Beginning with an overview of the century-long critical engagement with naturalism, Frye carefully shows how the naturalist idea has matured in the context of modernity and postmodernity, particularly in its relationship with the American South and West, regions that each inspired a distinct phase of McCarthy's long career. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both explicitly and obliquely with the project of Manifest Destiny, both in the western drama of Blood Meridian and the twentieth-century settings of TVA-era Knoxville in the Tennessee novels and the atomic frontier of Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. The concerns of these works are not explicitly American in Frye's reading: deep philosophical and religious questions are asked, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Nietzsche, and more contemporary inquiries. Frye argues for McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in the most profound sense. Unguessed Kinships includes biographical and historical context in each chapter, widening the appeal of the text to not just naturalists or McCarthy scholars, but anyone studying the literature of the South or the West. While the influential scholarship of Vereen Bell made a claim for nihilism as central to McCarthy, recent work has focused on the various philosophical, religious, and metaphysical underpinnings of his writing. In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye takes up the importance of both the natural world and naturalism to one of the most significant American writers of recent vintage"--

Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries PDF Author: Timo Müller
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110422425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
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.

The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque PDF Author: John D. Lyons
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190678461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 907

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Book Description
Few periods in history are so fundamentally contradictory as the Baroque, the culture flourishing from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in Europe. When we hear the term âBaroque,â the first images that come to mind are symmetrically designed gardens in French chateaux, scenic fountains in Italian squares, and the vibrant rhythms of a harpsichord. Behind this commitment to rule, harmony, and rigid structure, however, the Baroque also embodies a deep fascination with wonder, excess, irrationality, and rebellion against order. The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque delves into this contradiction to provide a sweeping survey of the Baroque not only as a style but also as a historical, cultural, and intellectual concept. With its thirty-eight chapters edited by leading expert John D. Lyons, the Handbook explores different manifestations of Baroque culture, from theatricality in architecture and urbanism to opera and dance, from the role of water to innovations in fashion, from mechanistic philosophy and literature to the tension between religion and science. These discussions present the Baroque as a broad cultural phenomenon that arose in response to the enormous changes emerging from the sixteenth century: the division between Catholics and Protestants, the formation of nation-states and the growth of absolutist monarchies, the colonization of lands outside Europe and the mutual impact of European and non-European cultures. Technological developments such as the telescope and the microscope and even greater access to high-quality mirrors altered mankindâs view of the universe and of human identity itself. By exploring the Baroque in relation to these larger social upheavals, this Handbook reveals a fresh and surprisingly modern image of the Baroque as a powerful response to an epoch of crisis.

Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism

Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism PDF Author: Rachel Greenwald Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107095220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Rachel Greenwald Smith's Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the relationship between contemporary American literature and politics. Through readings of works by Paul Auster, Karen Tei Yamashita, and others, Smith challenges the neoliberal notion that emotions are the property of the self.

Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction

Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction PDF Author: Sarah E. McFarland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350177652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This work analyzes 21st-century realistic speculations of human extinction: fictions that imagine future worlds without interventions of as-yet uninvented technology, interplanetary travel, or other science fiction elements that provide hope for rescue or long-term survival. Climate change fiction as a genre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing usually resists facing the potentiality of human species extinction, following instead traditional generic conventions that imagine primitivist communities of human survivors with the means of escaping the consequences of global climate change. Yet amidst the ongoing sixth great extinction, works that problematize survival, provide no opportunities for social rebirth, and speculate humanity's final end may address the problem of how to reject the impulse of human exceptionalism that pervades climate change discourse and post-apocalyptic fiction. Rather than following the preferences of the genre, the ecocollapse fictions examined here manifest apocalypse where the means for a happy ending no longer exists. In these texts, diminished ecosystems, specters of cannibalism, and disintegrations of difference and othering render human self-identity as radically malleable within their confrontations with the stark materiality of all life. This book is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary fictions that imagine the imbrication of human and nonhuman within global species extinctions. It closely interrogates novels from authors like Peter Heller, Cormac McCarthy and Yann Martel that reject the impulse of human exceptionalism to demonstrate what it might be like to go extinct.

Cormac McCarthy’s Borders and Landscapes

Cormac McCarthy’s Borders and Landscapes PDF Author: Louise Jillett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501319124
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Cormac McCarthy's work is attracting an increasing number of scholars and critics from a range of disciplines within the humanities and beyond, from political philosophy to linguistics and from musicology to various branches of the sciences. Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes contributes to this developing field of research, investigating the way McCarthy's writings speak to other works within the broader fields of American literature, international literature, border literature, and other forms of comparative literature. It also explores McCarthy's literary antecedents and the movements out of which his work has emerged, such as modernism, romanticism, naturalism, eco-criticism, genre-based literature (western, southern gothic), folkloric traditions and mythology.

Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament

Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament PDF Author: Matthew L. Potts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150133073X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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

Morality in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction

Morality in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction PDF Author: Russell M. Hillier
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319469576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book argues that McCarthy’s works convey a profound moral vision, and use intertextuality, moral philosophy, and questions of genre to advance that vision. It focuses upon the ways in which McCarthy’s fiction is in ceaseless conversation with literary and philosophical tradition, examining McCarthy’s investment in influential thinkers from Marcus Aurelius to Hannah Arendt, and poets, playwrights, and novelists from Dante and Shakespeare to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Antonio Machado. The book shows how McCarthy’s fiction grapples with abiding moral and metaphysical issues: the nature and problem of evil; the idea of God or the transcendent; the credibility of heroism in the modern age; the question of moral choice and action; the possibility of faith, hope, love, and goodness; the meaning and limits of civilization; and the definition of what it is to be human. This study will appeal alike to readers, teachers, and scholars of Cormac McCarthy.