Cormac McCarthy's Neoliberalism

A Breakdown in Mercantile Ethics

Brian Schill, Brian James Schill

• Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781621909385
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

In Cormac McCarthy’s Neoliberalism: Breakdown in Mercantile Ethics, editor Brian James Schill gathers insightful essays that probe how McCarthy’s works have commented on and caricatured the economic, political, and cultural forces of neoliberalism. Spanning McCarthy’s career from Suttree to his final novels The Passenger and Stella Maris, this volume positions McCarthy as both a chronicler of and a participant in the neoliberal era. The contributors explore how McCarthy’s fictions—often set against vast, barren landscapes—reflect the predatory logic of neoliberal capitalism, marked by economic inequality, environmental degradation, and social upheaval.
 
The nine essays presented here argue that McCarthy’s critiques go beyond the superficial and delve deeply into the material and cultural conditions shaped by neoliberal governance. By examining the commodification and accumulation of wealth, both in the settings of his novels and the lives of his characters, McCarthy is revealed as both a sharp observer of the social consequences of unchecked capitalist expansion and a participant in that expansion. Ultimately, Cormac McCarthy’s Neoliberalism demonstrates how the master’s works grapple with the ways in which neoliberalism has reshaped human relationships, from the intimate to the institutional, while casting a spotlight on those left behind by global economic forces.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: All Places Are the Wrong Place
• Chapter 1: Neoliberalism, Agency, and the Contradictory Community of The Gardner’s Son
• Chapter 2: “He wanted to buy you”: Value and Abjection in The Road, All the Pretty Horses, and The Crossing
• Chapter 3: Hunger: Cormac McCarthy, Land Use, and Ethical Consumption in the Face of Biodisaster
• Chapter 4: Human Become Coin: Neoliberalism, Anthropology, and Human Possibilities in No Country for Old Men
• Chapter 5: “In what direction did lost men veer?”: Late Capitalism and Utopia in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
• Chapter 6: “Please dont tell how the story ends”: The Road and Neoliberalism
• Chapter 7: Diamonds, Drugs, and the Digital Age: Global Capitalism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor
• Chapter 8: Necrocapitalism at the end of the world: The Economics of Death in The Counselor
• Chapter 9: The Archaeology of Neoliberalism
• Contributors
• Index