New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy: Encountering the Passenger and Stella Maris

Leading scholars take stock of McCarthy's final novels, illuminating the arc of his career, influence, and legacy New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy provides the first full-scale scholarly assessment of McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris. While marked by McCarthy's unmistakable literary style, these novels deviate from his previous works. Focusing on mathematics and science, and venturing into new genres and locales, McCarthy's last novels showcase his most developed and complex meditations on the nature of life and human consciousness. The essays in this volume chart unexpected paths through McCarthy's work by engaging the reader through topics including the writer's style and literary influences; quantum entanglement and mathematical topos theory; and the ecological, institutional, and ethical bounds of his engagement with themes of history, capitalism, and psychiatry. Compiled altogether, the contributors invite readers to question, explore, and speculate—at times in quite radical ways—about how to read McCarthy's work as a whole.