Challenging the Western in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Abstract

Set in the nineteenth-century American Southwest, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian rewrites the conventions of the western genre through a historically informed fictionalized account of the Glanton gang. As part of McCarthy’s subversive literary oeuvre, the novel intends to deromanticize the western’s underlying myths and dismantle its binaries, as well as to expose the brutality of the frontier and reflect on violence as a historiographic condition. Within studies of the western, McCarthy’s work, and transgressive literature, this article wishes to contribute to the existing discussions of McCarthy’s writing by examining Blood Meridian as a critical postmodern western or anti-western, and analyzing its strategies of demythologizing the West and the western.