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Cormac McCarthy: An American Apocalypse
This definitive assessment of Cormac McCarthy’s novels captures the interactions among the literary and mythic elements, the social dynamics of violence, and the natural world in The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, and The Road. Elegantly written and deeply engaged with previous scholarship as well as interviews with the novelist, this study provides a comprehensive introduction to McCarthy’s work while offering an insightful new analysis. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic theory, mythography, thermodynamics, and information science, Markus Wierschem identifies a literary apocalypse at the center of McCarthy’s work, one that unveils another buried deep within the history, religion, and myths of American and Western culture.
524 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 2024
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 26, 2026
Great premise, needed more plot.
Just joking! This is an academic text focused, as the title obviously shows, the works of Cormac McCarthy. Maybe it is my passion for his corpus of work, but this is riveting! Fascinating balance between (relevant) tangents into historical context and circulating philosophies, and close reading of the individual texts.
The chronicles McCarthy's different engagements with the 'Apocalypse'. Not just a physical apocalypse, but a spiritual one as well. A common theme from Blood Meridian to No Country for Old Men is this emergence of violence. McCarthy examines the continual presence of violence, but also how it has evolved and taken new, arguably more terrifying, forms in the 20th century.
As an academic text, I would not be found widely recommending this, but it was excellent for my research and I found it thought-provoking. McCarthy has a knack to draw his readers into additional research, where they feel compelled to explore further the themes he engages with. If you fall into that camp, I really recommend just reading the introduction of this, and then the rest if you are feeling an obsession with McCarthy's work...
Just joking! This is an academic text focused, as the title obviously shows, the works of Cormac McCarthy. Maybe it is my passion for his corpus of work, but this is riveting! Fascinating balance between (relevant) tangents into historical context and circulating philosophies, and close reading of the individual texts.
The chronicles McCarthy's different engagements with the 'Apocalypse'. Not just a physical apocalypse, but a spiritual one as well. A common theme from Blood Meridian to No Country for Old Men is this emergence of violence. McCarthy examines the continual presence of violence, but also how it has evolved and taken new, arguably more terrifying, forms in the 20th century.
As an academic text, I would not be found widely recommending this, but it was excellent for my research and I found it thought-provoking. McCarthy has a knack to draw his readers into additional research, where they feel compelled to explore further the themes he engages with. If you fall into that camp, I really recommend just reading the introduction of this, and then the rest if you are feeling an obsession with McCarthy's work...
Displaying 1 of 1 review