The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy

The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Jonathan Elmore
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807183407
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy presents eleven essays of original scholarship that undertake a programmatic reassessment of McCarthy’s literary and philosophical worldview. Examining issues of race, morality, history, metaphysics, law, economics, and ecology in McCarthy’s writing reveals how these themes intersect in an overarching, positive gesture that characterizes his work. Taken together, the essays offer a more expansive understanding of McCarthy’s critique of contemporary society, while providing new clarity on his vision of alternate ways of living and community beyond their present life-denying manifestations.

The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy

The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Jonathan Elmore
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807183407
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy presents eleven essays of original scholarship that undertake a programmatic reassessment of McCarthy’s literary and philosophical worldview. Examining issues of race, morality, history, metaphysics, law, economics, and ecology in McCarthy’s writing reveals how these themes intersect in an overarching, positive gesture that characterizes his work. Taken together, the essays offer a more expansive understanding of McCarthy’s critique of contemporary society, while providing new clarity on his vision of alternate ways of living and community beyond their present life-denying manifestations.

The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy

The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Jonathan Elmore
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807183415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy presents eleven essays of original scholarship that undertake a programmatic reassessment of McCarthy’s literary and philosophical worldview. Examining issues of race, morality, history, metaphysics, law, economics, and ecology in McCarthy’s writing reveals how these themes intersect in an overarching, positive gesture that characterizes his work. Taken together, the essays offer a more expansive understanding of McCarthy’s critique of contemporary society, while providing new clarity on his vision of alternate ways of living and community beyond their present life-denying manifestations.

The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy

The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Georg Guillemin
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585443413
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Georg Guillemin’s visionary approach to the work of Western novelist Cormac McCarthy combines an overall survey of McCarthy’s eight novels in print with a comprehensive analysis of the author’s evolving ecopastoralism. Using in-depth textual interpretations, Guillemin argues that even McCarthy’s early work is characterized less by traditional nostalgia for a lost pastoral order than by a radically egalitarian land ethic that prefigures today’s ecopastoral tendencies in Western American writing. The study shows that more than any of the other landscapes evoked by McCarthy, the Southwestern desert becomes the stage for his dramatizations of a wild sense of the pastoral. McCarthy’s fourth novel, Suttree, which is the only one set inside an urban environment, is used in the introductory chapter to discuss the relevant compositional aspects of his fiction and the methodology of the chapters to come. The main part of the study devotes chapters to McCarthy’s Southern novels, his keystone work Blood Meridian, and the Western novels known as the Border Trilogy. The concluding chapter discusses the broader context of American pastoralism and suggests that McCarthy’s ecopastoralism is animistic rather than environmentalist in character. Guillemin shows that the very popular Border Trilogy takes McCarthy’s ecopastoralism to its culmination, although this is often overlooked precisely because of the simplicity of the plots—picaresque quests. As the trilogy arranges its plots as a search for a life of pastoral harmony (All the Pretty Horses), envisions a nomadic version of pastoral (The Crossing), and experiences the foreclosure of the pastoral vision anywhere (Cities of the Plain), the trilogy as a whole tacitly acknowledges the obsolescence of utopian pastoralism. Increasingly, man ceases to be the dominant focus of narration, so that the shift from an egocentric to an ecocentric sense of self marks both the heroes and narrators of McCarthy’s novels.

Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fin de Siecle to the Millennium

Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fin de Siecle to the Millennium PDF Author: Sharla Hutchison
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147662271X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Zombies, vampires and ghosts feature prominently in nearly all forms of entertainment in the 21st century, including popular fiction, film, comics, television and computer games. But these creatures have been vital to the entertainment industry since the best-seller books of a century and half ago. Monsters don't just invade popular culture, they help sell popular culture. This collection of new essays covers 150 years of enduringly popular Gothic monsters who have shocked and horrified audiences in literature, film and comics. The contributors unearth forgotten monsters and reconsider familiar ones, examining the audience taboos and fears they embody.

The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer PDF Author: Walker Percy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453216251
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review). On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul. A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life. With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him. Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.

The World Is a Book, Indeed

The World Is a Book, Indeed PDF Author: Peter LaSalle
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174246
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The World Is a Book, Indeed chronicles in eleven rich personal essays the ongoing quest of award-winning writer Peter LaSalle to embark on offbeat, often startlingly revelatory literary travel. LaSalle spends a summer roaming the lesser-known quarters of Paris, haunted by the writing of the French surrealists. In Hanoi, he meets for beers with the editors—two military men—of the Army Literature and Arts Magazine while investigating Vietnam’s acknowledged great modern novel, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War. Other pieces find LaSalle on a strange nighttime drive through the streets of sprawling São Paulo in search of landmarks associated with Brazilian modernist poetry, bouncing around Africa to interview writers there when very young, exploring Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges's memorable stay in Texas, and traveling to Istanbul, Lisbon, Tunis, and elsewhere, as he considers major writers amid the settings that produced their works. Deeply felt and replete with insight into literature and life itself, even capable of evoking valid mind leaps in its innovative approaches, this is a collection for readers who love books and want to learn more about the places they originated, presented by a well-traveled guide with an intimate voice and a gift for the essay form.

The New View from Cane River

The New View from Cane River PDF Author: Heather Ostman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807177784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The New View from Cane River features ten in-depth essays that provide fresh, diverse perspectives on Kate Chopin’s first novel, At Fault. While much critical work on the author prioritizes her famous, groundbreaking second book, The Awakening, its 1890 predecessor remains a fascinating text that presents a complicated moral universe, including a plot that involves divorce, alcoholism, and murder set in the aftermath of the Civil War. Edited by Chopin scholar Heather Ostman, the essays in The New View from Cane River provide multiple approaches for understanding this complex work, with particular attention to the dynamics of the post-Reconstruction era and its effects on race, gender, and economics in Louisiana. Original perspectives introduced by the contributors include discussions of Chopin’s treatment of privilege, sexology, and Unitarianism, as well as what At Fault reveals about the early stages of literary modernism and the reading audiences of late nineteenth-century America. This overdue reconsideration of an overlooked novel gives enthusiastic readers, students, and instructors an opportunity for new encounters with a cherished American author.

Blood Work

Blood Work PDF Author: Shawn Salvant
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807157864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The invocation of blood-as both an image and a concept-has long been critical in the formation of American racism. In Blood Work, Shawn Salvant mines works from the American literary canon to explore the multitude of associations that race and blood held in the consciousness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans. Drawing upon race and metaphor theory, Salvant provides readings of four classic novels featuring themes of racial identity: Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902); Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892); and William Faulkner's Light in August (1932). His expansive analysis of blood imagery uncovers far more than the merely biological connotations that dominate many studies of blood rhetoric: the racial discourses of blood in these novels encompass the anthropological and the legal, the violent and the religious. Penetrating and insightful, Blood Work illuminates the broad-ranging power of the blood metaphor to script distinctly American plots-real and literary-of racial identity.

My Mark Twain

My Mark Twain PDF Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Reminiscences of Howells' friendship with Mark Twain, followed by criticism of about a dozen of his major works (chiefly book reviews previously published in various periodicals).

Surprised by Sound

Surprised by Sound PDF Author: Roi Tartakovsky
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175420
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
In Surprised by Sound, Roi Tartakovsky shows that the power of rhyme endures well into the twenty-first century even though its exemplary usages may differ from traditional or expected forms. His work uncovers the mechanics of rhyme, revealing how and why it remains a vital part of poetry with connections to large questions about poetic freedom, cognitive and psychoanalytic theories, and the accidental aspects of language. As a contribution to studies of sound in poetry, Surprised by Sound takes on two central questions: First, what is it about the structure of rhyme that makes it such a potent and ongoing source of poetic production and extrapoetic fascination? Second, how has rhyme changed and survived in the era of free verse, whose prototypical poetry is as hostile to poetic meter as it is to the artificial sound of rhyme, including the sound of rhythmic thumping at the end of every line? In response, Tartakovsky theorizes a new category of rhyme that he terms “sporadic.” Since it is not systematized or expected, sporadic rhyme can be a single, strongly resounding rhyme used suddenly in a free verse poem. It can also be an internal rhyme in a villanelle or a few scattered rhymes unevenly distributed throughout a longer poem that nevertheless create a meaningful cluster of words. Examining usages across varied poetic traditions, Tartakovsky locates sporadic rhyme in sources ranging from a sixteenth-century sonnet to a nonsensical, practically unperformable piece by Gertrude Stein and a 2007 MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times. With careful attention to the soundscapes of poems, Surprised by Sound demonstrates that rhyme’s enduring value lies in its paradoxical and unstable nature as well as its capacity for creating poetic, cognitive, and psychic effects.