The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy presents eleven essays of original scholarship that undertake a programmatic reassessment of McCarthy’s literary and philosophical worldview. Examining issues of race, morality, history, metaphysics, law, economics, and ecology in McCarthy’s writing reveals how these themes intersect in an overarching, positive gesture that characterizes his work. Taken together, the essays offer a more expansive understanding of McCarthy’s critique of conte...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner"[Morrison] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America."—Chicago TribuneMorrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a bl...

A roadmap to the dark and mythic topography of McCarthy's fictionNamed 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. In Understanding Cormac McCarthy Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatmen...

"This lively collection of essays on the ideas underpinning his films enriches and enlarges our understanding of Spielberg's complex body of work." —Joseph McBride, author of Steven Spielberg: A BiographyFew directors have had as powerful an influence on the film industry and the movie-going public as Steven Spielberg. Whatever the subject—dinosaurs, war, extra-terrestrials, slavery, the Holocaust, or terrorism—one clear and consistent touchstone is present...

This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other ad...

Cormac McCarthy, the author of such works as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, is one of America's greatest living writers--an uncompromising examiner of the depths of human depravity, the nature of evil, and the bonds that endure.This companion is intended for both the scholar and lay reader seeking a comprehensive understanding of McCarthy's body of work. Alphabetically ordered entries offer analysis of novels, characters, motifs, allusions, pla...

Essays about how stories of the Old West reflect—and affect—our beliefs and values.The solitude of the lone rider, the loyalty of his horse, and the unspoken code of the West—for many, Western movies embody America and its values, though the view of the country's history they present isn't always accurate. In recent years, scholars had declared the genre dead, but a steady resurgence of western themes in literature, film, and television has reestablished its import...

A radical defense of a solitary lifeWhat single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities today.Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this s...

By examining the fiction of three women modernists--Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen--this book complicates binary paradigms of national, gender, and ethnic identities in the interwar period. In place of essentializing categories of identity, Jessica Rabin explores the liberating and dislocating ramifications of using multiple subject positions as a means of representing identity. While these three authors have been studied in non-intersecting categories (pioneer literature, ...

Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present.The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available todayCovers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, t...

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 t...

Red, White & Black is a provocative critique of socially engaged films and related critical discourse. Offering an unflinching account of race and representation, Frank B. Wilderson III asks whether such films accurately represent the structure of U.S. racial antagonisms. That structure, he argues, is based on three essential subject positions: that of the White (the “settler,” “master,” and “human”), the Red (the “savage” and “half-human”), and the Black (the “slave” and “non-hum...