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This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to one of the
most vibrant and expansive traditions in world literature. The
American West occupies a unique place in the global imagination,
and the literature it produced transcends the category of 'region'
in theme and form. Written by prominent international scholars, the
essays cover a diverse group of key texts and authors, including
major figures in the Native American, Hispanic, Asian American, and
African American movements. Treatments range from environmental and
ecopoetic to transnational and transcultural, reflecting the
richness of the field. This volume places the literature in deep
historical context and features a chronology and a bibliography for
further reading. It will be an essential guide for students of
literature of the American West and of American literature
generally.
This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to one of the
most vibrant and expansive traditions in world literature. The
American West occupies a unique place in the global imagination,
and the literature it produced transcends the category of 'region'
in theme and form. Written by prominent international scholars, the
essays cover a diverse group of key texts and authors, including
major figures in the Native American, Hispanic, Asian American, and
African American movements. Treatments range from environmental and
ecopoetic to transnational and transcultural, reflecting the
richness of the field. This volume places the literature in deep
historical context and features a chronology and a bibliography for
further reading. It will be an essential guide for students of
literature of the American West and of American literature
generally.
Cormac McCarthy both embodies and redefines the notion of the
artist as outsider. His fiction draws on recognizable American
themes and employs dense philosophical and theological subtexts,
challenging readers by depicting the familiar as inscrutably
foreign. The essays in this Companion offer a sophisticated yet
concise introduction to McCarthy's difficult and provocative work.
The contributors, an international team of McCarthy scholars,
analyze some of the most well-known and commonly taught novels -
Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and The Road -
while providing detailed treatments of McCarthy's work in cinema,
including the many adaptations of his novels to film. Designed for
scholars, teachers and general readers, and complete with a
chronology and bibliography for further reading, this Companion is
an essential reference for anyone interested in gaining a deeper
understanding of one of America's most celebrated living novelists.
Cormac McCarthy both embodies and redefines the notion of the
artist as outsider. His fiction draws on recognizable American
themes and employs dense philosophical and theological subtexts,
challenging readers by depicting the familiar as inscrutably
foreign. The essays in this Companion offer a sophisticated yet
concise introduction to McCarthy's difficult and provocative work.
The contributors, an international team of McCarthy scholars,
analyze some of the most well-known and commonly taught novels -
Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and The Road -
while providing detailed treatments of McCarthy's work in cinema,
including the many adaptations of his novels to film. Designed for
scholars, teachers and general readers, and complete with a
chronology and bibliography for further reading, this Companion is
an essential reference for anyone interested in gaining a deeper
understanding of one of America's most celebrated living novelists.
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.
Named by Harold Bloom as one of the most significant American
novelists of our time, Cormac McCarthy has been honored with the
National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for
All the Pretty Horses, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the
Pulitzer Prize for The Road, and the coveted MacArthur Fellowship.
Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of McCarthy's fiction
to date, dealing with the author's aesthetic and thematic concerns,
his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation
in Western literary traditions. Frye provides extensive readings of
each novel, charting the trajectory of McCarthy's development as a
writer who invigorates literary culture both past and present
through a blend of participation, influence, and aesthetic
transformation. Understanding Cormac McCarthy explores the early
works of the Tennessee period in the context of the ""romance""
genre, the southern gothic and grotesque, as well as the
carnivalesque. A chapter is devoted to Blood Meridian, a novel that
marks McCarthy's transition to the West and his full recognition as
a major force in American letters. In the final two chapters, Frye
explores McCarthy's Border Trilogy and his later works?
specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road?addressing the
manner in which McCarthy's preoccupation with violence and human
depravity exists alongside a perpetual search for meaning, purpose,
and value. Frye provides scholars, students, and general readers
alike with a clearly argued foundational examination of McCarthy's
novels in their historical and literary contexts as an ideal
roadmap illuminating the author's work as it charts the dark and
mythic topography of the American frontier.
The values of literary naturalism at play in one of America’s
most visionary novelistsIt took six novels and nearly thirty years
for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success with the National
Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses, followed by major
prizes, more best sellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work.
Those successes, though, have obscured McCarthy’s commitment to
an older form of literary expression: naturalism. It is hardly a
secret that McCarthy’s work tends to darker themes: violence,
brutality, the cruel indifference of nature, themes which would not
be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But
literary naturalism is more than the oversimplified Darwinism that
many think of. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and humans are
part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature
is capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality, as well. In
Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye illuminates all these dimensions of
McCarthy’s work. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both
explicitly and obliquely with the project of manifest destiny, in
the western drama Blood Meridian, the Tennessee Valley
Authority-era Tennessee novels, and the atomic frontier of
Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. McCarthy’s concerns are deeply
religious and philosophical, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy,
Gnosticism, and Nietzsche, among other sources. Frye argues for
McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in
the most expansive sense. Unguessed Kinships includes biographical
and historical context in each chapter, widening the appeal of the
text to not just naturalists or McCarthy scholars but anyone
studying the literature of the South or the West.
The values of literary naturalism at play in one of America’s
most visionary novelistsIt took six novels and nearly thirty years
for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success with the National
Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses, followed by major
prizes, more best sellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work.
Those successes, though, have obscured McCarthy’s commitment to
an older form of literary expression: naturalism. It is hardly a
secret that McCarthy’s work tends to darker themes: violence,
brutality, the cruel indifference of nature, themes which would not
be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But
literary naturalism is more than the oversimplified Darwinism that
many think of. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and humans are
part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature
is capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality, as well. In
Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye illuminates all these dimensions of
McCarthy’s work. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both
explicitly and obliquely with the project of manifest destiny, in
the western drama Blood Meridian, the Tennessee Valley
Authority-era Tennessee novels, and the atomic frontier of
Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. McCarthy’s concerns are deeply
religious and philosophical, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy,
Gnosticism, and Nietzsche, among other sources. Frye argues for
McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in
the most expansive sense. Unguessed Kinships includes biographical
and historical context in each chapter, widening the appeal of the
text to not just naturalists or McCarthy scholars but anyone
studying the literature of the South or the West.
This title includes in-depth critical discussions of Edgar Allan
Poe's work. This is a collection of sixteen essays by leading
scholars examining the short stories and life of the 19th century
American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Representing the best of a broad
range of critical perspectives from the psychoanalytical to the
postcolonial, the volume serves as an excellent introduction to
Poe's tales and the critical conversation surrounding them. The
volume is introduced by Steven Frye, Professor of English at
California State University, Bakersfield, the author of
""Historiography and the American Romance: A Study of Four
Authors"" (2001) and the editor of ""Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism:
History, Theory, Interpretation"" (2008). Original essays
illuminate the influences that shaped Poe, contextualize his work,
and assess his enduring impact on American and Continental poetry
and fiction. A sketch of the historical and cultural forces
surrounding Poe illuminates their influence on his aesthetic; a
reception history examines Poe's enduring contributions to the
short story genre, the French Symbolist movement, and modernist
aesthetics; a comparison of Poe's and Baudelaire's works reveals
how the two authors exploited the duplicitous possibilities within
the writer-reader relationship; and a critical reading of ""The
Fall of the House of Usher,"" ""The Black Cat,"" ""The Tell-Tale
Heart,"" ""Ligeia,"" and ""Bernice"" seeks to expose the stories'
unifying aesthetic principles. Further, a varied selection of
critical views offers detailed analyses of Poe's most essential
tales like ""The Murders in the Rue Morgue"", ""The Fall of the
House of Usher"", ""The Cask of Amontillado"", ""The Gold Bug"",
and ""Ligeia"". Uniquely, the collection also contains an original
essay by Nathaniel Rich, senior editor of ""The Paris Review"".
Reflecting on Poe's insight into and fascination with the perverse
instincts of humanity, Rich offers a writer's perspective on one of
America's most enigmatic writers. Finally, a wealth of reference
material, including a complete list of Poe's publications and a
full biography, rounds out the volume by giving readers ample
sources for continuing their studies. Edited and with an
introduction by Steven Frye, the collection is a gateway into the
best of Poe and his critics. Each essay is 5,000 words in length,
and all essays conclude with a list of 'Works Cited', along with
endnotes.
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