Now back in print, Vereen M. Bell's The Achievement of Cormac
McCarthy was the first critical book devoted to an author who would
become one of the most celebrated American writers of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century. Published in 1988, before
McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and had
his novels adapted into acclaimed films, Bell's study offered the
first systematic review of the author's work. According to Bell,
part of the difficulty of analyzing McCarthy's fiction is that the
novelist by design works against all conventional ways of seeing
and dealing with the world. Any formulaic readings, particularly
those associated with the traditional schemes of southern
literature, will be distorted. McCarthy's novels are provocatively
mysterious yet specific and vivid as well. They are also
freestanding and unclassifiable Bell shows how McCarthy transforms
the world through language, how he reconstitutes both urban and
rural settings so that otherwise barely articulate and unheroic
people live vividly in a context that is both modernist and
antimodernist. In this respect, Bell argues, McCarthy's work is
about the tension between visions of the world and the intractable,
opposing materiality of it, between the mysteriousness of an
individual's private engagement with experience and social
normality's tendency to flatten it out. At the same time, Bell
shows McCarthy's infatuation with the reality of evil, how the evil
in human form in his novels is as inexplicably gratuitous and
violent as the inhuman form of random and destructive natural
events. Such violence, for McCarthy, is built into existence and
cannot be evaded or rationalized away. With detailed readings of
McCarthy's first five novels—The Orchard Keeper, Child of God,
Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian—Bell demonstrates the
novelist's faith in the protean capacity of language to disclose
the layered possibilities and richness of being. Widely cited by
scholars, Bell's book established many of the foundational critical
frameworks for approaching McCarthy's work. It is now available in
an affordable paperback edition.
General
Imprint: |
Louisiana State University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
October 2023 |
Authors: |
Vereen M. Bell
• Scott Romine
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
160 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8071-8037-2 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-8071-8037-8 |
Barcode: |
9780807180372 |
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