Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

by Julian Murphet (Editor), Mark Steven (Editor)

Overview

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered here: the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its political, spiritual, and economic climates; the second, whose exponents include Paul Patton, Sean Pryor, Chris Danta, and Grace Hellyer, deals with the formal dimensions of McCarthy's characteristically brilliant prose in relation to its sparse narrative. By coupling historically sensitive analysis with incisive formal criticism, the contributors not only account for the matchless form of this exemplary novel; they also suggest that The Road has something unique to disclose about the world we inhabit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441198198
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	06/28/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	363 KB

About the Author

Julian Murphet is Professor of Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), co-author of Narrative and Media (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Literature and Visual Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Mark Steven is a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he teaches media, popular culture, and cultural theory and convenes the Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture research cluster. He has published articles and chapters on literature, cinema, and philosophy.
Mark Steven is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (2017) and Splatter Capital (2017).

Table of Contents

A Note on the Texts                        
1. IntroductionMark Steven and Julian Murphet            
2. "The cold illucid world": The Poetics of Gray in Cormac McCarthy's The RoadChris Danta                            
3. McCarthy's RhythmSean Pryor                
4. Spring has lost its scent: Allegory, Ruination, and Suicidal Melancholia in The RoadGrace Hellyer                        
5. The Late World of Cormac McCarthyMark Steven        
6. Road, Fire, Trees: Cormac McCarthy's Post-AmericaPaul Sheehan                                        
7. The Cave and The Road: Styles of Forgotten DreamsJulian Murphet                                        
8. McCarthy's FirePaul Patton                    
9. Afterword: Acts of kindness-Reflections on a different kind of road movieMary Zournazi                            

Notes on Contributors                        
Index