The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy

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David Holloway

Foreword by Rick Wallach

Book Code: GM2227

ISBN: 0-313-32227-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32227-3

DOI:

216 pages

Greenwood Press

Publication: 7/30/2002

List Price: $102.95 (UK Sterling Price: £59.95)

Availability: In Stock

Media Type: Hardcover

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Literature » American Literature
Literature » Critical Theory

Series Title: Contributions to the Study of World Literature

Series Number: 115

Endorsement From Peter Messent
University of Nottingham: David Holloway has written a book that will be invaluable to McCarthy scholars and to all those concerned with the status and function of narrative art and of literary criticism in the contemporary period. Writing from a broadly Marxist perspective, Holloway sites McCarthy's novels in a series of critical contexts that run from Lukacs to Jameson, and from Sartre to Derrida to Ecocriticism. The clarity and incisiveness of his work here is exemplary....Just as impressive, however, is Holloway's sensitivity to the nuances of McCarthy's language and to the formal strategies he uses. His readings of the individual texts, particularly of the Border Trilogy, and his analysis of the implications of McCarthy's developing style of 'optical democracy,' are first rate. This is critical work of a high order.
Endorsement From Edwin T. Arnold
Professor of English
Appalachian State University: David Holloway's Marxian reading of McCarthy proves again just how rich and complex McCarthy's work is to support such a remarkable interrogation. Always the careful scholar, Holloway is also a courageous one, building on previous criticism in exciting and often provocative ways. Grounded in the solid, textual world of commodity and exchange, the book explores McCarthy's marvelous language, his sense of storytelling, and his contemplation of existential estrangement and spiritual transcendence with the critical rigor of the scholar and the avid appreciation of the engaged reader. Holloway points us all in new directions, and his work must be seen as essential to a fuller understanding of this astonishing artist.

Description: Through close examination of the formal as well as thematic organization of Cormac McCarthy's eight novels, this volume offers a radically new assessment of the work of an author who has often been described as one of the greatest contemporary American novelists. In opposition to existing McCarthy scholarship--which tends to concentrate on the regional dimensions of his work, viewing it within the literary and mythopoetic traditions of the South and Southwest--Holloway argues that McCarthy's full significance can only be understood if his work is contextualized within the broader political, economic, and intellectual discourses of the period in which his novels have been produced. Drawing on the ideas of Marxist thinkers such as Fredric Jameson, George Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre, he shows how McCarthy's late modernism resists many of the postmodern assumptions about literary narrative that have come to shape our understanding of aesthetics in recent times.

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Rick Wallach
Introduction
The Ideology of Representation
The Waning of Historicity
Transcoding McCarthy's Existentialism: The Materiality of Form
Nature/Language: Figuring Utopia in McCarthy's Ecocritics of Style
Works Cited

LC Card Number: 2001057725

LCC Class: PS3563

Dewey Class: 813


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