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The Cormac McCarthy Journal

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The Cormac McCarthy Journal
See caption.
Cover of The Cormac McCarthy Journal Vol. 14, No. 2 (2016), featuring a photograph of the author by Derek Shapton
Discipline
LanguageEnglish
Edited byStacey Peebles
Publication details
History2001–present
Publisher
FrequencyBiannual
0.1 (2022)
Standard abbreviations
ISO 4Cormac McCarthy J.
Indexing
ISSN2333-3073 (print)
2333-3065 (web)
LCCN2009263299
JSTORcormmccaj
OCLC no.49857355
Links

The Cormac McCarthy Journal is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal of literary criticism dedicated to the study of the American author Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023). The journal launched in 2001 as an annual publication of the Cormac McCarthy Society. Since 2015, it has been published on a biannual basis by the Penn State University Press.

As of 2023, McCarthy was one of only three American writers to have an academic journal devoted exclusively to their work that began publication within the writer's own lifetime, alongside James Dickey and Philip Roth.[1]

Background on early McCarthy studies and the Cormac McCarthy Society

Main article: Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy c. 1980, when he was an obscure author

By the 2010s McCarthy had entered the literary canon as one of the greatest American authors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.[2] However, he did not acquire this stature until relatively late in his writing career. His early works received positive reviews but were virtually unknown outside of a small, but devoted coterie of academics. Between the publication of his first novel in 1965 until about 1992, he received little critical notice—much less than major contemporaries (born in the 1930s) like Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon.[3] A rare early in-depth treatment of McCarthy's work was The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (1988) by Vereen M. Bell.[4]

Then, in 1992, McCarthy had his first major commercial and critical success. All the Pretty Horses became an unexpected bestselling hit, bringing a wave of interest from critics, scholars, and journalists.[4] Most of the first wave of McCarthy scholarship appeared in essay collections published as anthologies by university presses.[5] Also among "handful of sympathetic publications" that took a consistent early interest in McCarthy's work were Southwestern American Literature, Western American Literature, and The Southern Review.[6] In summer 1992, The Southern Quarterly published an entire issue devoted to McCarthy, and most of the essays collected in the journal were later republished as Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy.[7]

The Cormac McCarthy Society began in October 1993 as an informal literary society of scholars who had attended the first academic conference on McCarthy at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky.[8] Most scholars in attendance came from universities in the Southern United States and had overlapping interests in literature of the South, particularly William Faulkner, to whom McCarthy was often compared.[9] Scholars in the Cormac McCarthy Society, however, saw McCarthy as a great author worthy of study in his own right, and sought to counter perceptions that he was influenced by Faulkner to the point of derivativeness.[10]

Publication history

The Cormac McCarthy Society (1998–2014)

By 1998, the Cormac McCarthy Society began self-publishing scholarly articles online at its website, cormacmccarthy.com. The first print edition of The Cormac McCarthy Journal appeared in 2001.[11] The Society published new issues of the journal on a roughly annual basis.[10] The journal has been a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.[12] The position of editor was held by John Wegner of Angelo State University from its first issue until 2009.[13] That year, the online journal moved from the McCarthy society's website to the Texas Digital Library.[14] Stacey Peebles of Centre College took over as editor in 2010.[15]

As of 2013, Blood Meridian (1985) was the most-discussed of McCarthy's works in the journal, while bestsellers like All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men (2005), and The Road (2006) had also received significant attention.[16] Special issues of the journal have been devoted to individual works by McCarthy. In 2004, the journal commemorated the silver anniversary of the publication of Suttree (1979) with a collection of papers collected from a conference celebrating the novel in its central setting of Knoxville, Tennessee in October of that year.[17] According to McCarthy scholar Peter Josyph, the Suttree conference papers were originally intended for publication as an anthology, and its failure to materialize in book form served as an example of the "Suttree Syndrome" of critical neglect toward a novel he regards as a "masterpiece".[18] An essay collection on Suttree, expanding on the special issue with additional papers from the 25th-anniversary conference, was eventually published in 2013.[19] Shortly after the publication of The Road, the journal dedicated a special issue to the novel with "investigations of the father-son relationship, the realism of the geography, pastoral imagery, philosophical contexts, and, ultimately, the interrelationship of these issues with McCarthy's other works."[20]

Penn State University Press (2015–present)

In 2014, Penn State University Press announced that it would begin publishing The Cormac McCarthy Journal the following year.[21] The Cormac McCarthy Journal joined Penn State University Press's roster of journals covering individual authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton.[22] James McWilliams, a professor at Texas State University, remarked that the announcement signaled a "rare honor for any writer, much less a living one, to achieve" and said the journal's adoption by a university press "speaks volumes about the enduring themes that McCarthy continues to engage with Faulknerian ambition and Homeric prose."[21] The journal's back catalog of articles, including those that were self-published by the Cormac McCarthy Society, became available on the online scholarly databases like JSTOR and Project MUSE, and it was indexed in the MLA Bibliography. The print journal began publishing two issues a year in 2016.[11]

In 2022, the journal published an archival trove of several rare interviews with McCarthy printed in small newspapers in Tennessee and Kentucky, between 1968 and 1980.[23] Given the author's reluctance to engage with the press, the journal's find was considered a noteworthy source of insight into the early period of his career. The article received coverage in such outlets as The New York Times,[24] Kirkus Reviews,[25] and the Knoxville News Sentinel, the last of which had originally printed two of the articles republished by The Cormac McCarthy Journal.[26]

By the time of McCarthy's death in 2023, The Cormac McCarthy Journal remained the only periodical dedicated to the author and his works.[27]

Indexing and abstracting

The journal is indexed and abstracted in the following bibliographic databases:

According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2022 impact factor of 0.1.[33]

See also

References

  1. ^ Shelton 2023.
  2. ^ Frye 2017, p. 23.
  3. ^ Frye 2017, p. 2.
  4. ^ a b Peebles 2020, p. 317.
  5. ^ Frye 2017, pp. 4–5.
  6. ^ Monk 2013, p. 116.
  7. ^ Peebles 2020, p. 317; Vieth 2012, p. 37.
  8. ^ Peebles 2020, p. 318; Vieth 2012, p. 38.
  9. ^ Frye 2017, pp. 3–4.
  10. ^ a b Frye 2017, p. 4.
  11. ^ a b c d e Peebles 2020, p. 318.
  12. ^ Texas Digital Library staff 2010.
  13. ^ Wegner 2001, p. 4; Park 2009.
  14. ^ Wegner 2009, p. iii; Park 2009.
  15. ^ Flyn 2019.
  16. ^ Monk 2013, p. 115.
  17. ^ Arnold 2005, pp. 6–7.
  18. ^ Josyph 2010, p. 41.
  19. ^ Wallach 2013, p. iii.
  20. ^ Vieth 2012, pp. 42–43.
  21. ^ a b McWilliams 2014.
  22. ^ Peebles 2015, p. 1.
  23. ^ Luce & Turpin 2022, pp. 108–135.
  24. ^ Harris 2022.
  25. ^ Schaub 2022.
  26. ^ Turner 2022.
  27. ^ Frye 2022.
  28. ^ EBSCO n.d.
  29. ^ Clarivate n.d.
  30. ^ Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills n.d.
  31. ^ De Gruyter n.d.
  32. ^ ProQuest n.d.
  33. ^ Clarivate 2023.

Sources

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