Counternarrative Possibilities reads Cormac McCarthy's Westerns against the backdrop of two
formative tropes in American mythology: virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after '9 11'
). Looking at McCarthy's Westerns in the context of American Studies James Dorson shows how
his novels counter the national narratives underlying these tropes and reinvest them with new
potentially transformative meaning. Departing from prevailing accounts of McCarthy that place
him in relation to his literary antecedents Counternarrative Possibilities takes a
forwardlooking approach that reads McCarthy's work as a key influence on millennial fiction.
Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between
aesthetics and politics this book is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique
in the twenty-first century and an original reconsideration of McCarthy's work 'after
postmodernism'.
