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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"--
Author: Steven Frye
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 081736109X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Get Book Here
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"--
Author: Michael Lynn Crews
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477313486
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer for the New York Times Magazine that "books are made out of books," but he has been famously unwilling to discuss how his own writing draws on the works of other writers. Yet his novels and plays masterfully appropriate and allude to an extensive range of literary works, demonstrating that McCarthy is well aware of literary tradition, respectful of the canon, and deliberately situating himself in a knowing relationship to precursors. The Wittliff Collection at Texas State University acquired McCarthy's literary archive in 2007. In Books Are Made Out of Books, Michael Lynn Crews thoroughly mines the archive to identify nearly 150 writers and thinkers that McCarthy himself references in early drafts, marginalia, notes, and correspondence. Crews organizes the references into chapters devoted to McCarthy's published works, the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, and McCarthy's correspondence. For each work, Crews identifies the authors, artists, or other cultural figures that McCarthy references; gives the source of the reference in McCarthy's papers; provides context for the reference as it appears in the archives; and explains the significance of the reference to the novel or play that McCarthy was working on. This groundbreaking exploration of McCarthy's literary influences—impossible to undertake before the opening of the archive—vastly expands our understanding of how one of America's foremost authors has engaged with the ideas, images, metaphors, and language of other thinkers and made them his own.
Author: Andrew R. Russ
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 081322005X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Andrew Russ argues in this book that a closer look at their philosophical underpinnings finds that Rousseau, Marx, and Foucault are much less "historical" in their methodology than is widely believed. Instead, they share a more "timeless" view, one indebted to principles ordinarily seen as timeless or transcendent
Author: D. Quentin Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108246516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
History has not been kind to the 1980s. The decade is often associated with absurd fashion choices, neo-Conservatism in the Reagan/Bush years, the AIDS crisis, Wall Street ethics, and uninspired television, film, and music. Yet the literature of the 1980s is undeniably rich and lasting. American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 seeks to frame some of the decade's greatest achievements such as Toni Morrison's monumental novel Beloved and to consider some of the trends that began in the 1980s and developed thereafter, including the origins of the graphic novel, prison literature, and the opening of multiculturalism vis-à-vis the 'canon wars'. This volume argues not only for the importance of 1980s American literature, but also for its centrality in understanding trends and trajectories in all contemporary literature against the broader background of culture. This volume serves as both an introduction and a deep consideration of the literary culture of our most maligned decade.
Author: Lee Clark Mitchell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501329642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
"Argues through close readings of twentieth-century American novels for a return to the foundations of literary study"--
Author: Steven Frye
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107018153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
This book provides a sophisticated introduction to the life and work of Cormac McCarthy appropriate for scholars, teachers and general readers.
Author: Bryan Santin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316516482
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
This volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel.
Author: John Beck
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803226691
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
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.
Author: John Sepich
Publisher: Univ of TX + ORM
ISBN: 0292794320
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
“Sepich offers his insight and detailed research to the less knowledgeable reader. He crafts a book that will delight the McCarthy specialists.” —Western American Literature Blood Meridian (1985), Cormac McCarthy’s epic tale of an otherwise nameless “kid” who in his teens joins a gang of licensed scalp hunters whose marauding adventures take place across Texas, Chihuahua, Sonora, Arizona, and California during 1849 and 1850, is widely considered to be one of the finest novels of the Old West, as well as McCarthy’s greatest work. The New York Times Book Review ranked it third in a 2006 survey of the “best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years,” and in 2005 Time chose it as one of the 100 best novels published since 1923. Yet Blood Meridian’s complexity, as well as its sheer bloodiness, makes it difficult for some readers. To guide all its readers and help them appreciate the novel’s wealth of historically verifiable characters, places, and events, John Sepich compiled what has become the classic reference work, Notes on Blood Meridian. Originally published in 1993, Notes remained in print for only a few years and has become highly sought-after in the rare book market, with used copies selling for hundreds of dollars. In bringing the book back into print to make it more widely available, Sepich has revised and expanded Notes with a new preface and two new essays that explore key themes and issues in the work. This amplified edition of Notes on Blood Meridian is the essential guide for all who seek a fuller understanding and appreciation of McCarthy’s finest work.
Author: James D. Lilley
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826327680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Even before Harold Bloom designated Blood Meridian as the Great American Novel, Cormac McCarthy had attracted unprecedented attention as a novelist who is both serious and successful, a rare combination in recent American fiction. Critics have been quick to address McCarthy’s indebtedness to southern literature, Christianity, and existential thought, but the essays in this collection are among the first to tackle such issues as gender and race in McCarthy’s work. The rich complexity of the novels leaves room for a wide variety of interpretation. Some of the contributors see racist attitudes in McCarthy’s views of Mexico, whereas others praise his depiction of U.S.-Mexican border culture and contact. Several of the essays approach McCarthy’s work from the perspective of ecocriticism, focusing on his representations of the natural world and the relationships that his characters forge with their geographical environments. And by exploring the author’s use of and attitudes toward language, some of the contributors examine McCarthy’s complex and innovative storytelling techniques.
