Download or read book The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy written by Vereen M. Bell and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy written by Vereen M. Bell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2023-10-18 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Cormac Mccarthy Companion written by Edwin T. Arnold and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to examine McCarthya s three masterpiece novels as a cohesive whole"
Download or read book Blood Meridian written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Download or read book Cormac McCarthy written by Robert L. Jarrett and published by Macmillan Reference USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this astute and learned analysis of McCarthy's fiction, Robert Jarrett looks at all seven of the novels published to date and responds to much of the current (and proliferating) critical thought about McCarthy. After an introductory biographical chapter, Jarrett addresses what he considers the two phases of McCarthy's fiction: as a regional writer of the Appalachian South, whose work mixes modernist and realistic techniques and merges contemporary fiction with the tradition of Southern literature (as in The Orchard Keeper [1965], Outer Dark [1968], Child of God [1973], and Suttree [1979]), and as a bold experimenter in form and style, with a keenly rendered postmodern esthetic (as in Blood Meridian [1985], All the Pretty Horses, and The Crossing [1994]). Jarrett regards McCarthy's early novels as attempts to write a modern fiction of the twentieth-century Tennessee hill country, comparable to what local-color realists or regionalists accomplished in the nineteenth century and to what William Faulkner accomplished in his mixture of modernism and regionalism in his Yoknapatawpha fiction. It is during his second phase, Jarrett points out, that the locales of McCarthy's novels shift to the Southwest, and any appearance they give of being popular westerns becomes only a disguise. In the final chapter Jarrett stresses three distinctive aspects of McCarthy's fiction: the diverse and idiosyncratic style of the narrative discourse, the central theme of the quest undertaken through a visionary landscape, and the role of interpolated tales. Drawing keenly on literary theory to synthesize the various strands of McCarthy's unique narrative voice, Jarrett concludes that while the author's tales -often steeped in violence - may not tell us what we want to hear, the enduring pleasure of his novels lies in their imaginative and stylistic power.
Download or read book The Road written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). • From the bestselling author of The Passenger A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Download or read book The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy written by Georg Guillemin and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Religion in Cormac McCarthy s Fiction written by Manuel Broncano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the religious scope of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, one of the most controversial issues in studies of his work. Current criticism is divided between those who find a theological dimension in his works, and those who reject such an approach on the grounds that the nihilist discourse characteristic of his narrative is incompatible with any religious message. McCarthy’s tendencies toward religious themes have become increasingly more acute, revealing that McCarthy has adopted the biblical language and rhetoric to compose an "apocryphal" narrative of the American Southwest while exploring the human innate tendency to evil in the line of Herman Melville and William Faulkner, both literary progenitors of the writer. Broncano argues that this apocryphal narrative is written against the background of the Bible, a peculiar Pentateuch in which Blood Meridian functions as the Book of Genesis, the Border Trilogy functions as the Gospels, and No Country for Old Men as the Book of Revelation, while The Road is the post-apocalyptic sequel. This book analyzes the novels included in what Broncano defines as the South-Western cycle (from Blood Meridian to The Road) in search of the religious foundations that support the narrative architecture of the texts.
Download or read book Myth Legend Dust written by Rick Wallach and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost three decades, Cormac McCarthy solidified his reputation as an American "writer's writer" with remarkable novels such as his Appalachian Tales, The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and his terrifying Western masterpiece, Blood Meridian. Then, with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, the first work of his celebrated Border Trilogy in 1992, McCarthy's popularity exploded on to a world stage. As his reputation burgeoned with the publications of The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, the critical response to McCarthy has grown apace.
Download or read book Cormac McCarthy s All the Pretty Horses written by Stephen Tatum and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2002-01-11 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.
Download or read book Robert Lowell Nihilist as Hero written by Vereen M. Bell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vereen Bell gives us a subtly reasoned account of the pattern of Lowell's poetry is characterized above all by its chronic and systematic pessimism, but that, paradoxically, Lowell's reluctance to accept the consequences of his own unsparing vision is what gives his poetry its vigor, richness, and tonal complexity.
Download or read book Child of God written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • In this taut, chilling story, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. "Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Download or read book Cities of the Plain written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Knopf Publishing Group. This book was released on 1998 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The setting is New Mexico in 1952, where John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands. To the North lie the proving grounds of Alamogordo; to the South, the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light. It is a life that is about to change forever, and John Grady and Billy both know it. The catalyst for that change appears in the form of a beautiful, ill-starred Mexican prostitute. When John Grady falls in love, Billy agrees--against his better judgment--to help him rescue the girl from her suavely brutal pimp. The ensuing events resonate with the violence and inevitability of classic tragedy
Download or read book The Crossing written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1995-03-14 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The second volume of the award-winning Border Trilogy—From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road—fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning—a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Download or read book No Place for Home written by Jay Ellis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was written to venture beyond interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and always emotionally isolated and socially detached characters. As McCarthy usually eschews direct indications of psychology, his landscapes allow us to infer much about their motivations. The relationship of ambivalent nostalgia for domesticity to McCarthy's descriptions of space remains relatively unexamined at book length, and through less theoretical application than close reading. By including McCarthy's latest book, this study offer the only complete study of all nine novels. Within McCarthy studies, this book extends and complicates a growing interest in space and domesticity in his work. The author combines a high regard for McCarthy's stylistic prowess with a provocative reading of how his own psychological habits around gender issues and family relations power books that only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, expressions of misogynistic fear, or antinomian rejections of civilized life.
Download or read book The Counselor Movie Tie in Edition written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road—in this screenplay of the major motion picture, the Counselor makes a risky entrée into the drug trade, on the eve of becoming a married man, and gambles that the consequences won’t catch up to him. Along the gritty terrain of the Texas–Mexico border, a respected and recently engaged lawyer throws his stakes into a cocaine trade worth millions. His hope is that it will be a one-time deal and that, afterward, he can settle into life with his beloved fiancée. But instead, the Counselor finds himself mired in a brutal and dangerous game—one that threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves. Deft, shocking, and unforgettable, McCarthy is at his finest in this gripping tale about risk, consequence, and the treacherous balance between the two. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Download or read book The Orchard Keeper written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1993 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American classic, The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest novelists and author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller All the Pretty Horses. Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee, it tells the story of a young boy and the outlaw bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.
