Exploring concepts such as the Southern Gothic novel, the Southwest border, faith and suicide, and father-son relationships, respected scholar Kenneth Lincoln shows how McCarthy's canticles of praise, grief, and warning mix classic, biblical, and ballad genres and cross the lyrical with the narrative.

This book is a guide to Cormac McCarthy's canon from The Road to All the Pretty Horses, delving into the dominant themes in his work, his influences from Faulkner to Dante, and the current cultural debates his books have figured into.

"With tremendous narrative drive, unpretentious grace, and a thorough grasp of McCarthy's themes, Kenneth Lincoln invites the reader into McCarthy's astonishingly creative and dramatic writing. Lincoln's timely study covers writing hybrids of mytho-poetic saga and red-dirt realism for our age. McCarthy's wise, dubious, existential edge reflects on the deepest American themes of regeneration through violence, particularly the roles of men in the creation of our inescapable national identity. His stories ask readers whether a country so created out of blood and greed can ever redeem itself. Lincoln limns the writer's deepest probings with enthusiastic invitations, excellent plot summaries, and thoughtful provocations. Cormac McCarthy allows students and general readers to ask the essential question: Can we survive our own culture of blood and violence?" - Peter Nabokov, Dept. of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA

Autorentext
KENNETH LINCOLN is Professor of Contemporary Literature, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.

Inhalt
Penetrant and Simple Western Storykeeper Canticles Down West Back to Appalachia Dark is a Way Child of Whose God? Southern Milltown Script Awakening Frontier Muses Go Bloody West Theater Grotessco Vacquero, Ride On Star-Crossed Cowboy Horse Sense and Human Fate A Sorry Tale Live or Die, Brother? The Final Story