Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road [Paperback]

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered here: the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its political, spiritual, and economic climates; the second, whose exponents include Paul Patton, Sean Pryor, Chris Danta, and Grace Hellyer, deals with the formal dimensions of McCarthy's characteristically brilliant prose in relation to its sparse narrative. By coupling historically sensitive analysis with incisive formal criticism, the contributors not only account for the matchless form of this exemplary novel; they also suggest that The Road has something unique to disclose about the world we inhabit.

This collection shows how Cormac McCarthy's The Road reacts aesthetically to many of the ethical, ontological, and political concerns that define our times.

Julian Murphetis Professor of Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), co-author of Narrative and Media (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Literature and Visual Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Mark Stevenis a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he teaches media, popular culture, and cultural theory and convenes the Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture research cluster. He has published articles and chapters on literature, cinema, and philosophy.

A Note on the Texts
1. Introduction
Mark Steven and Julian Murphet 2. The cold illucid world : The Poetlç