No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Frye, Steven, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 223 pp. Paperback US. $27.99. ISBN 9781107644809.Winner of numerous awards including an Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the MacArthur Genius the National Book Award, the National Book Circle Critics Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, Cormac McCarthy remains one of the world's most celebrated writers who, even as he enters his 80s, shows no sign of slowing down. As his work continues to receive acclaim in the form of major awards, steady book sales, and successful film and television adaptations, there has perhaps never been a better moment to be a McCarthy scholar. At the time of this writing, James Franco's adaptation of Child of God- released nationally with positive early reviews-comes on the heels of recent productions such as The Counselor (2013) and The Sunset Limited (2011), also scripted by McCarthy. Likewise, the 2007 adaptation of No Country for Old Men, which was well received by critics and audiences alike, garnered several Academy Awards and has become the second highest grossing film for the Coen brothers. McCarthy's Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Road (2006)-although not as successful on screen as the Coens' film for a number of reasons-continues to appear on reading lists used by book clubs as well as high school and university literature and environmental studies departments. With The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, editor Steven Frye has assembled a group of essays that address the exciting new output and diverse achievements of the author. While the volume places McCarthy's work in the context of regionalism as it shifts from southern U.S. to western American literary traditions, the contributors also examine national and transnational issues in his work. The result is an engaging and timely collection that will no doubt be of use to a broad range of readers, both inside and outside the academy.Given the mystique surrounding McCarthy which has been encouraged in part by his own reluctance to give interviews or speak with the press, Frye's timeline and introduction offer important correctives to popular mistruths about the writer, especially rumors that he had had no direct experience with the American West prior to the publication of his Border Trilogy. In fact, the author had traveled to the southwest, specifically to Tucson in the early 1970s to conduct research that helped him create Blood Meridian. McCarthy has also lived all over the country, from New England to the far North and from the Midwest to the South. Fie has likewise visited France, England, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, and Mexico. These experiences of mobility are reflected in his writings, particularly as various characters who are deeply rooted in a local geography find they must confront challenges and changes brought by forces stemming from a larger outside world.The volume is divided into sections that move chronologically and geographically and that address influences on his work along with the innovations he has made to those traditions. Frye's collection also addresses themes and issues commonly found in McCarthy's writings, including literary naturalism, morality and heroism, and problems of gender identity, particularly masculinity and its discontents. Frye's introductory essay explains McCarthy often engages central philosophical discussions, delving into Gnosticism and Catholicism as well as the ideas of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Brian Evenson addresses similar concerns in an essay on philosophical themes in McCarthy's Tennessee novels. As Evenson notes, selfhood and subjectivity are particular concepts the author grapples with, often through traditions of existentialism and the absurd (54). The relationship of the self to the other in particular remains a constant concern for McCarthy, who frequently shows how philosophies come to inform individual situations of an embodied consciousness within an imperfect world (63). …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.