Title: Understanding Cormac McCarthy
Description: Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of Cormac McCarthy's fiction to date, dealing with the author's aesthetic and thematic concerns, his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation in Western literary traditions. Frye provides extensive readings of each novel, charting the trajectory of McCarthy's development as a writer who invigorates literary culture both past and present through a blend of participation, influence, and aesthetic transformation. He explores the early works of the Tennessee period in the context of the romance genre, the southern gothic, and the grotesque. A chapter is devoted to Blood Meridian, a novel that marks McCarthy's transition to the West and his full recognition as a major force in American letters. Frye also explores McCarthy's Border Trilogy and his later works-specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road-addressing the manner in which McCarthy's preoccupation with violence and human depravity exists alongside a perpetual search for meaning, purpose, and value.
Subjects: In literature, Criticism and interpretation, Mccarthy, cormac, 1933-, Southern states, in literature, West (u.s.), in literature, American literature, history and criticism, 20th century
Places: Southern States, Mexican-American Border Region, West (U.S.)
People: Cormac McCarthy (1933-)