Cormac McCarthy in Context

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.

• Part I. Environments: 1. Life and career Steven Frye; 2. The South Scott Yarbrough; 3. The Southwest Lydia Cooper; 4. The Santa Fe Institute Ciaran Dowd; Part II. Literary Contexts: Sources, Influences, Allusions: 5. William Faulkner Jay Watson; 6. Ernest Hemingway Olivia Carr Edenfield; 7. Herman Melville and the American Romance tradition G. R. Thompson; 8. Romanticism Dustin Anderson; 9. Naturalism Adam H. Wood; 10. The Bible Alan Noble; 11. Allusion and allegory Bill Hardwig; Part III. Intellectual Contexts: 12. The Judeo-Christian tradition James Dorson; 13. Gnosticism Benjamin West; 14. Classical and pre-classical philosophy David Williams; 15. Nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy Julius Greve; 16. Formal aesthetic choices Bryan Vescio; 17. Science and technology Jay Ellis; Part IV. Social and Cultural Contexts: 18. American politics David Holloway; 19. Race and cultural difference John Dudley; 20. Ecology Susan Kollin; 21. Modernity Nicholas Monk; 22. A visual artist on McCarthy Peter Josyph; 23. Cinematic adaptations Lee Clark Mitchell; 24. Cinematic influences Petra Mundik; Part V. Archives, Critical History, Translation: 25. The archives and the Tennessee years, I: The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark Dianne C. Luce; 26. The archives and the Tennessee years, II: Child of God, The Gardener's Son, and Suttree Dianne C. Luce; 27. The San Marcos archives: Blood Meridian and the West Michael Lynn Crews; 28. Letters and correspondence Katie Salzmann; 29. Critical history Stacey Peebles; 30. Translation and international reception, I Beatrice Trotignon; 31. Translation and international reception, II Beatrice Trotignon.

'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