Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature Paperback - 2023

From the rear cover

'Wide-ranging and rich in new insights, this book impresses with its confident perception of the overarching values that unify McCarthy's body of work.'
Dianne Luce, author of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period

'Lydia Cooper brilliantly reads McCarthy's peripatetic novels to reveal a single focused vision.... One cannot help but leave this book eager to return to a McCarthy seen entirely anew.'
Lee Clark Mitchell, Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres, Princeton University

'A brilliant, elegant, and incisive inquiry into the scientific and philosophical ideas that inform McCarthy's work.'
Steven Frye, Professor and Chair of English, California State University, Bakersfield

'With this timely and fascinating book, Lydia Cooper draws together the three most recent and robust points of interest in McCarthy studies - economics, environmentalism, and complexity theory - an intersection of topics that is broadly applicable in our contemporary world as well.'
Stacey Peebles, Marlene and David Grissom Professor of Humanities, Associate Professor of English at Centre College

Cormac McCarthy: A complexity theory of literature offers the first sustained analysis of McCarthy's literary engagement with complex systems, from food webs to evolutionary economics. Focusing on McCarthy's depiction of the role of economics and art on global inequality and eco-disaster, this book argues that McCarthy makes a compelling case study that challenges us to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how literature intervenes in and shapes public policy, rhetoric, and personal value systems.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the influence of complexity theory on McCarthy's ten novels, two published screenplays and plays, and three unpublished screenplays to date. In addition to this unique contribution to McCarthy studies, this book models a complexity theory-informed approach to literary studies, uniting stylistic analysis with relevant contextual political, historical, and cultural theories of narrative. Drawing on archival materials as well as on complexity research published through the Santa Fe Institute and scholarly work on McCarthy and on current modes of literary analysis that offer timely interventions in our understanding of the role of literature in shaping our understanding of the world, this book has broad appeal and will be of interest to scholars at the undergraduate through postgraduate levels as well as professional scholars interested in McCarthy, in contemporary American literature, and in the theory and practice of literary studies.