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.
Brief description:
DAVID HOLLOWAY is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Derby, England. He has published scholarly articles and book chapters on 20th-century American literature and popular culture.
Review Quotes: "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."-Edwin T. Arnold Professor of English Appalachian State University