No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy

by Jay Ellis

Overview

This book was written to venture beyond interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and always emotionally isolated and socially detached characters. As McCarthy usually eschews direct indications of psychology, his landscapes allow us to infer much about their motivations. The relationship of ambivalent nostalgia for domesticity to McCarthy's descriptions of space remains relatively unexamined at book length, and through less theoretical application than close reading. By including McCarthy's latest book, this study offer the only complete study of all nine novels. Within McCarthy studies, this book extends and complicates a growing interest in space and domesticity in his work. The author combines a high regard for McCarthy's stylistic prowess with a provocative reading of how his own psychological habits around gender issues and family relations power books that only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, expressions of misogynistic fear, or antinomian rejections of civilized life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135513436
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/05/2013
Series:	Studies in Major Literary Authors
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	557 KB

About the Author

Jay Ellis

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in McCarthy; Chapter 2 “Fled, banished in death or exile:” Constraint and Flight in The Orchard Keeper; Chapter 3 Unhousing a Child of God; Chapter 4 Sins of the Father, Sins of the Son in Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian; Chapter 5 “What happens to country” in Blood Meridian; Chapter 6 From Country to Houses in The Border Trilogy; Chapter 7 Fetish and Collapse in No Country for Old Men; Chapter 8 No Place for Home;

Editorial Reviews

"Ultimately, the real achievement of the critic [Ellis] is his ability to take earthy material and underline for his readers the scope of its most heartening impacts." — Craig Monk, The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Volume 62, Number 1, Spring 2008

From the Publisher