San Antonio College Library

Publishers description: Even before Harold Bloom designated Blood Meridian as the Great American Novel, Cormac McCarthy has attracted unprecedented attention as a novelist who is both serious and successful, a rare combination in recent American fiction. Critics have been quick to address McCarthy's indebtedness to southern literature, Christianity, and existential thought, but the essays in this collection are among the first to tackle such issues...

Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of Cormac McCarthy's fiction to date, dealing with the author's aesthetic and thematic concerns, his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation in Western literary traditions. Frye provides extensive readings of each novel, charting the trajectory of McCarthy's development as a writer who invigorates literary culture both past and present through a blend of participation, influence, and...

The author analyzes metaphorical border crossings between ideologies and between cultures in films and novels set in the early US Southwest. In addition to seminal works such as Blood Meridian, Go Down Moses, and The Wild Bunch, he considers lesser-known American works, Chicano, Mexican, and Native American literature, and writings by women and ex-slaves.

Thirteen essays on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands examine the cultural interplay between the two countries as representative of the interaction between Anglo and Hispanic America. They explore such topics as the evocation of the Southwest in the writings of Harvey Fergusson, Miguel Mendez, and Rudolfo Anaya; the role of the American writers John Dos Passos and Katherine Anne Porter in bringing contemporary Mexican painters to the attention of critics...

"In this bold contribution to contemporary feminist theory, Sonia Saldivar-Hull argues for a feminism that transcends national borders and ethnic identities. Grounding her work in an analysis of the novels and short stories of three Chicana writers--Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, and Helena Maria Viramontes--Saldivar-Hull examines a range of Chicana feminist writing from several disciplines, which she collects under the term "feminism on the border."...