Nyhet

Tangential Terrains

Cormac McCarthy's Geoaesthetics

AvStefanie Heine

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

Del i serien Western Literature and Fiction Series

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Beskrivning

Tangential Terrains is an ecocritical study of the work of Cormac McCarthy, focusing primarily on his depictions of the desert and inorganic nature in Blood Meridian. Close readings of previously unexamined archival manuscripts and drafts shed new light on McCarthy's compositional processes, revealing how the development of written matter in the novel-in-progress can correspond to geological processes like erosion, erratics, stratification, and continental drift. Blood Meridian's emergent geoaesthetics reveals forces operating according to other-than-human principles, as literary desert terrains retain a passive resistance, or weak agency, which presents a radical disturbance of anthropocentrism, mirrored in the novel's style. Though the mediated unstable deserts in Blood Meridian defy appropriation, they are neither untouched nor untouchable: the borderlands bear the wounds and "blood meridians" of a non-chronological history of violence, tangential to the massacres of Native American and Mexican peoples depicted in the novel. Stefanie Heine's reading of Blood Meridian offers a crucial contribution to and intervention in contemporary ecocriticism, Anthropocene criticism, and New Materialist theories, encouraging readers to critically rethink customary notions of entanglement, kinship, and agency.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-03-10
Mått:152 x 229 x 13 mm
Vikt:454 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Western Literature and Fiction Series
Antal sidor:280
Förlag:University of Nevada Press
ISBN:9781647792312

Utforska kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur
Djurböcker inom Djur och Natur

Mer om författaren

Stefanie Heine is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of both Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse: Virginia Woolf's Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot's Image and Poetics of Breathing: Modern Literature's Syncope, among other books.

Recensioner i media

"In Tangential Terrains, Heine shows that she is an extraordinarily adept close reader, and her writing contains a number of excellent, fine-grained analyses that manage to shed new light on even some of the most canonized passages in Blood Meridian. Moreover, her extensive archival work provides eye-opening insights into McCarthy's methods of composition." —Tore Rye Andersen, associate professor of comparative literature, Aarhus University, Denmark, author of Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene "The problem of geoaesthetics is explored in Tangential Terrains in meticulous individual analyses and close readings. Heine combines an extremely high theoretical level with precise philological work. If there is to be anything like an inorganic turn in literary studies in the near future, this book will play a major role in it." —Wolfgang Hottner, associate professor in comparative literature, University of Bergen, Norway, author of Crystallizations: Aesthetics and Poetics of the Inorganic in the late 18th Century

Innehållsförteckning

Contents Introduction Descriptive Pauses versus Narrative Progression Abandoning the Character Perspective Tangentiality versus Entanglement Desert Wastelands Tangential Reading Migratory Spalls of Burning Matter Defiant Terrains 2. Representations and Things McCarthy's Language Theory Reframed Literary Defiance of Nomenclature and Representationalism Toward a Literary Geomorphology Geoaesthetic Effects in Chamberlain and McCarthy Formless Resemblance Elemental and Written Forms at Work 4. Floating Worlds, Floating Words Dividing Out, Holding Together Continental and Textual Drift Liminal Localities, Desert Ab-solutes Use and Textual Recycling Mythical Family Relations between Humans and Stone Linguistic Links Ambiguities Acoustic Tangents, Fearful Symmetries 6. Animal Terrain Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index About the Author