Georg Guillemin's visionary approach to the work of Western 
novelist Cormac McCarthy combines an overall survey of McCarthy's 
eight novels in print with a comprehensive analysis of the author's 
evolving ecopastoralism. Using in-depth textual interpretations, 
Guillemin argues that even McCarthy's early work is characterized 
less by traditional nostalgia for a lost pastoral order than by a 
radically egalitarian land ethic that prefigures today's ecopastoral 
tendencies in Western American writing.

    The study shows that more than any of the other landscapes 
evoked by McCarthy, the Southwestern desert becomes the stage 
for his dramatizations of a wild sense of the pastoral. McCarthy's 
fourth novel, Suttree, which is the only one set in an urban 
environment, is used in the introductory chapter to discuss the 
relevant compositional aspects of his fiction and the methodology
of the chapters to come.

    The main part of the study devotes chapters to McCarthy's 
Southern novels, his keystone work Blood Meridian, and the Western 
novels known as the Border Trilogy. The concluding chapter discusses 
the broader context of American pastoralism and suggests that 
McCarthy's ecopastoralism is animistic rather than environmentalist 
in character. Increasingly, man ceases to be the dominant focus of 
narration, so that the shift from an egocentric to an ecocentric 
sense of self marks both the heroes and the narrators of McCarthy's 
novels.

_________________________________________________________

GEORG GUILLEMIN lives in Berlin and works as a freelance
translator, photographer, and writer. He holds a Ph.D. in American 
literature.


Number Eighteen: Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in 
the Humanities


What people are saying about this book

". . . interesting, original, ambitious, sometimes brilliant."—Dianne C.
Luce, President, The Cormac McCarthy Society