Cormac McCarthy

New Directions

James D. Lilley

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780826327680
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below

abject

abjection

characteristics

formation of

kid

melancholia

as primordial conflict

sacred power of horror

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

African American lullaby

African Americans

afterlife

agency

aggressivity

Agrarian tradition

agriculture

Alejandra

Alfonsa

allegoresis: baroque

concept of

allegory: child imagery

defined

facticity of death

functions

melancholia

All the Pretty Horses, God’s role

historical repetition

language

Mexican representations

monumental time

novelistic world

romance

romantic ideals

significance

women

women characters

American nation

amorality

Anglo versus Mexican minds

anthropocentrism

antimyth

Anzaldúa, Gloria

apocalyptic paradigm

Appalachian fiction

Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force

Arcadia

argonauts

asocial point of view

aspen leaf imagery

atomic. See nuclear issues

atravesados (border crossers)

autonomy

Bakhtin, Mikhail M.

carnival

Ballard, Lester

barbed wire fence

baroque: allegoresis

defined

vision

The Bear (Faulkner)

bear themes

death as symbol

beautiful versus sublime

beauty

benign violence

Beowulf: described and analyzed

Grendel’s rival double

martial code

relationship to Blood Meridian

Berry, Wendell

Bible

Bierce, Ambrose

biocentric view of nature

Birth of Iron myth

blacksmith, heedless

blind man

blood: as metaphor

Mexicanness

milk and

Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West: aesthetic function

agency

conflict of doubles

epic resonance

female characters

gender

lack of human implication

language

martial code

martial interregnum

melancholy subtext

natural world

nature vis-à-vis human

noble bond

oppositions describing

origins

as parody

performa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: “There Was Map Enough for Men to Read”: Storytelling, the Border Trilogy, and New Directions
• History and the Ugly Facts of Blood Meridian
• The Lay of the Land in Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachia
• The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian
• History, Bloodshed, and the Spectacle of American Identity in Blood Meridian
• Abjection and “the Feminine” in Outer Dark
• All the Pretty Mexicos: Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican Representations
• “Blood is Blood”: All the Pretty Horses in the Multicultural Literature Class
• The Cave of Oblivion: Platonic Mythology in Child of God
• From Beowulf to Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy’s Demystification of the Martial Code
• McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing
• “See the Child”: The Melancholy Subtext of Blood Meridian
• Leaving the Dark Night of the Lie: A Kristevan Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction
• “Hallucinated Recollections”: Narrative as Spatialized Perception of History in The Orchard Keeper
• Cormac McCarthy’s Sense of an Ending: Serialized Narrative and Revision in Cities of the Plain
• Index