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

by Ellis; Jay

• ISBN13: 9780415977340
• ISBN10: 0415977347
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-07-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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 bestories of masculine heroics, expressions of misogynistic fear, or antinomian rejections of civilized life.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Chapter One Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in McCarthy	1	(38)
Chapter Two "Fled, banished in death or exile:" Constraint and Flight in The Orchard Keeper	39	(30)
Chapter Three Unhousing a Child of God	69	(44)
Chapter Four Sins of the Father, Sins of the Son in Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian	113	(56)
Chapter Five "What happens to country" in Blood Meridian	169	(30)
Chapter Six From Country to Houses in The Border Trilogy	199	(26)
Chapter Seven Fetish and Collapse in No Country for Old Men	225	(38)
Chapter Eight No Place for Home	263	(54)
Notes	317	(20)
Bibliography	337	(10)
Index	347