The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy - by Jonathan Elmore & Rick Elmore

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"These innovative essays challenge the critical orthodoxies about McCarthy's engagement with religion, philosophy, language, race, and American legal and social history. The volume as a whole is an indispensable resource for readers seeking to understand the full range of McCarthy's work and for those seeking new insights into individual texts."--Nell Sullivan, former editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal

"Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore have drawn together a terrific collection of voices in McCarthy studies with this fresh and timely consideration of the author's career as a whole. It's exciting to read this particular group of writers, established scholars who aren't often put in conversation with each other. A fitting volume for the next era of McCarthy research."--Stacey Peebles, editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal

"Recognizing the evolution of McCarthy as a writer and the multiplicity of readings possible in his rich literary landscapes, this volume challenges dominant narratives and dives into understudied aspects of his works."--Lydia R. Cooper, author of Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

"Seeking to establish the fundamentally prescriptive and positive character of McCarthy's project, Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore have assembled an impressive array of cogent voices that engage the oeuvre in clever and intriguing ways certain to bear much critical fruit in the years to come."--D. Marcel DeCoste, author of Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment

"This collection charts a remarkable new direction in McCarthy studies. With insight and vigor, contributors approach the full canon of the author's works from the perspective of philosophy, ethics, politics, and character, and they expand our understanding of McCarthy immensely."--Steven Fyre, author of Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy

About the Author

Jonathan Elmore, associate professor of English at Louisiana Tech University, is the editor of Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction: Narrative in an Era of Loss.

Rick Elmore, associate professor of philosophy at Appalachian State University, is the coeditor of The Biopolitics of Punishment: Derrida and Foucault.