Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays

by Dennis Duncan (Editor)

A collection of 11 essays concerning the work of artist/author Tom McCarthy. Since the appearance in 2005 of his book "Remainder," McCarthy has been seen as one of the most significant British writers of the 21st century. Two of his first four novels appeared on the Man Booker shortlist, and his essays and artistic endeavors continue to challenge, engage, and excite the curious and adventurous.

"...Exploring the rich conceptual landscape of McCarthy's work, this wide-ranging collection demonstrates McCarthy's centrality to current critical debates about the legacies of modernism, the avant-garde, the aesthetics of the contemporary, and the philosophical value of the inhuman..." -- Justus Nieland, Michigan State University (from the back cover of the book)

258 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Dennis Duncan studied English at Manchester University, before completing a PhD at Birkbeck in 2011. After teaching at Birkbeck, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, then Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge. He joined the English department at University College London in 2019.

Library of Congress Authorities: Duncan, Dennis (Dennis J. B.)
Full name: Dennis John Balle Duncan

Reviews

[Garrett Peace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean, you kinda know what you’re getting with a book called “Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays.” I suppose it’s a testament to McCarthy’s books that I was not only willing but interested in reading a collection of critical essays about them. And there are several good ones here! The ones I found most interesting were Gill Partington’s “Dummy Chambers and Ur-Houses: How to Find Your Way Around in Remainder,” Martin Paul Eve’s “Structures, Signposts and Plays: Modernist Anxieties and Postmodern Influences in C,” and the pair of concluding essays discussing McCarthy’s work in relation to speculative realism, Arne De Boever’s “Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and ‘the Great Outdoors’” and Andrew Gibson’s “New Inhumanisms: Tom McCarthy and Speculative Realism” (which is really a trip, both in its ideas and prose style). Good work all around though—and mostly accessible (as these kinds of things go).

Funny to me that a majority of the criticism here is dedicated to Remainder when the most interesting work being written about McCarthy seems to be all about C. (Satin Island gets one essay, FYI.) Fitting, though, given that Remainder is so theory-friendly.