Masculinities, the new West(ern) and Cormac McCarthy's Southwestern novels

• Main Author: Fidanza, Luigi Riccardo
• Published: Manchester Metropolitan University 2008
• Subjects: 810
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.486418

This thesis intervenes and expands on the critical reception of Cormac McCarthy. Additionally, the thesis both complements and supplements the expanding field of masculinity studies. The study examines McCarthy's Southwestern fiction from Blood Meridian (1985) through the novels of the Border Trilogy (1992-1998) to No Countryfor Old Men (2005). In addition to the published novels the study addresses the unpublished , screenplay of Cities ofthe Plain (1984) held in the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University in'San Marcos, Texas. The thesis proposes that McCarthy's Southwestern fiction, with its preoccupation with men and masculinity, presents a valuable opportunity to investigate the recent developments in gender theory. Equally, gender theory offers new ways of reading McCarthy's work that attend to the political dimension absent in much of the existing criticism. I propose a syncretic·theoretical perspective which places Judith Butler's . ,. work on performativity at the centre of a framework intended to accommodate sociological sex role theory and psychological approaches to gender studies. The thesis argues that McCarthy's Southwestern novels simultaneously appropriate and disavow the potentially transformational politics of gender theory in general and masculinity studies in particular. Similarly, the study argues that the Southwestern novels repeat this process of acknowledgement and denial in relation to the Patricia Nelson Limerick led New Western History and concerns reflected in writing on the New West.