This definitive assessment of Cormac McCarthy’s novels captures the interactions among the literary and mythic elements, the social dynamics of violence, and the natural world in The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, and The Road. Elegantly written and deeply engaged with previous scholarship as well as interviews with the novelist, this study provides a comprehensive introduction to McCarthy’s work while offering an insightful new analysis. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic theory, mythography, thermodynamics, and information science, Markus Wierschem identifies a literary apocalypse at the center of McCarthy’s work, one that unveils another buried deep within the history, religion, and myths of American and Western culture.

Markus Wierschem studied and taught at the Paderborn University, Germany, and St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. His focus has been in English and American literary and cultural studies, as well as philosophy and the didactics and teaching of English as a foreign language. He is coeditor of Patterns of Dis|Order: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Un|Ordnung and Cormac McCarthy between Worlds.