Cormac McCarthy's Neoliberalism
A Breakdown in Mercantile Ethics
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.
BRIAN JAMES SCHILL is a writer and researcher at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences. He is the author of the literary history of punk and postpunk music, The Year’s Work in the Punk Bookshelf, and his articles have appeared in the Cormac McCarthy Journal, Punk & Post-Punk, Anarchist Studies, Salon, and elsewhere.