Cormac McCarthy - (Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction) by Sara Spurgeon & Sarah Graham

About the Book

Series statement from publisher's website.

Book Synopsis

This is a collection of original, stimulating interpretations of key texts by Cormac McCarthy, designed for students and edited and written by leading scholars in the field. Cormac McCarthy's significance in the field of contemporary American fiction is enormous. Harold Bloom has called him one of the greatest living American writers, and named him one of the three most important authors of the 20th century. His impact has been even greater in the 21st century. He won the American Book Award for "All the Pretty Horses (1991)", the Pulitzer Prize for "The Road (2006)", and his influence on contemporary American literature has been compared to that of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, while "The Guardian" likened the language of "The Road" to that of Beckett and Yeats. This collection of new critical perspectives on three of McCarthy's most widely studied novels - "All the Pretty Horses", "No Country for Old Men", and "The Road" - provides a wide-ranging introduction to the different interpretations of his work. Introductions to each set of essays encourage readers to see connections and contrasts between different approaches and comprehensive further reading will help students to take their study further. This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advance undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction.

Review Quotes

'Fascinating and provocative, these essays illuminate what one contributor calls the "terrible beauty" of three of Cormac McCarthy's best-known and more recent "primal fictions." With Sara Spurgeon's elegant introduction, this collection is both a helpful overview and an in-depth, philosophical and cultural exploration of one of the greatest writers in English today.'--Sanford Lakoff

About the Author

Sara Spurgeon is Associate Professor of Literatures of the American Southwest, Texas Tech University, USA.