Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Description

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered here: the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its political, spiritual, and economic climates; the second, whose exponents include Paul Patton, Sean Pryor, Chris Danta, and Grace Hellyer, deals with the formal dimensions of McCarthy's characteristically brilliant prose in relation to its sparse narrative. By coupling historically sensitive analysis with incisive formal criticism, the contributors not only account for the matchless form of this exemplary novel; they also suggest that The Road has something unique to disclose about the world we inhabit.

Julian Murphet is Professor of Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), co-author of Narrative and Media (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Literature and Visual Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Mark Steven is a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he teaches media, popular culture, and cultural theory and convenes the Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture research cluster. He has published articles and chapters on literature, cinema, and philosophy.

"A series of brilliant illuminations of McCarthy's great darkness, and great literary power. This book carries the fire." -- Michael Zeitlin, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of British Columbia, Canada "A timely study of McCarthy, featuring an excellent line-up of some of the very best emerging and established scholars working in literary studies, film studies, and philosophy." -- Alex Houen, University Lecturer and Fellow of Pembroke College Faculty of English University of Cambridge, UK.