Cormac McCarthy in Context

Description

Cormac McCarthy is a writer informed by an intense curiosity. His interests range from the natural world, to philosophy and religion, to history and culture. Cormac McCarthy in Context offers readers the opportunity to understand how various influences inform his rich body of work. The collection explores the relationship McCarthy has with his favourite authors, writers such as Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Other contexts are tremendously informative, including the American Romance tradition of the nineteenth century as well as modernity and the modernist literary movement. Influence and context are of absolute importance in understanding McCarthy, who is now being understood as one of the most significant authors of the contemporary period.

Steven Frye is Professor of American Literature and Chair of the English Department at California State University, Bakersfield, as well as President of the Cormac McCarthy Society. He has edited five collections and published three books that focus on the writers of the American Romance tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. He is an expert in the literature of the American West, and his edited volume The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy (Cambridge, 2013) was favorably reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement.

'This wide-ranging volume is a fitting response to McCarthy's corpus. And, like McCarthy's own works, it will provoke substantive discussions across a remarkable array of academic disciplines.' J. Bilbro, Choice