History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

D Phillips - American Literature, 1996 - JSTOR
D Phillips
American Literature, 1996JSTOR
But what sort of literature remains possible if we relinquish the myth of human apartness? It
must be a literature that abandons, or at least questions, what would seem to be literature's
most basic foci: character, persona, narrative consciousness. What literature could survive
under these conditions?-Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination The 1992 National
Book Award for fiction given to All the Pretty Horses brought Cormac McCarthy his first
widespread recognition as a writer of importance. Throughout most of his career, which …
But what sort of literature remains possible if we relinquish the myth of human apartness? It must be a literature that abandons, or at least questions, what would seem to be literature's most basic foci: character, persona, narrative consciousness. What literature could survive under these conditions?-Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination
The 1992 National Book Award for fiction given to All the Pretty Horses brought Cormac McCarthy his first widespread recognition as a writer of importance. Throughout most of his career, which began in the mid-1960s, McCarthy had worked and published in obscurity. Promotional campaigns meant little to him; he refused the interviews, personal appearances, and academic sinecures that might have made his name more widely known sooner. And for many years his readership was limited to a small group of admirers mostly from the South. All the Pretty Horses helped change all that, but it is not McCarthy's most noteworthy book. That honor belongs to Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), which, like All the Pretty Horses, might be called a" Western." Both novels trace the adventures of teenaged boys who run away to Mexico, but Blood Meridian
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