Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy

Book excerpt: This collection offers a fresh approach to the work of Cormac McCarthy, one of the most important contemporary American authors. Essays focus on his work across the genres and/or in constellation with other writers and artists, presenting not only a different "angle" on the work, but setting him within a broader literary and artistic context. Such an approach offers a view of McCarthy that is strikingly different to previous collections that have dealt with the work in an almost exclusively "single author" and/or "single genre" mode. McCarthy’s novels are increasingly regarded as amongst the most rich, the most complex, and the most insightful of all recent literary responses to prevailing conditions in both the USA and beyond, and this collection recognizes the intertextual and interdisciplinary nature of his work. Contributors draw back the curtain on some of McCarthy’s literary ancestors, revealing and analyzing some of the fiction’s key contemporary intertexts, and showing a complex and previously underestimated hinterland of influence. In addition, they look beyond the novel both to other genres in McCarthy’s oeuvre, and to the way these genres have influenced McCarthy’s writing.