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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, issues are published on a biannual basis by the Penn State University Press.

After decades in obscurity, McCarthy achieved his first mainstream commercial breakthrough with the bestselling novel All the Pretty Horses (1992), drawing new attention from critics and scholars. The Cormac McCarthy Society was established in 1993 as a literary society promoting study of his works. The journal originated with papers published online at the society's website before the appearance of its first print edition. Its contents have focused on literary criticism of McCarthy's works as well as biographical and historical research on topics related to his life and fiction.

The journal has been a major exponent of McCarthy studies since its inception. According to the literary scholar Steven Frye, it developed from "a publication committed to the interests of a small group of like-minded scholars" into "a fully developed professional academic journal, indexed in all major outlets."[1] While there are many periodicals about specific authors, The Cormac McCarthy Journal was—as of 2023—one of only three scholarly journals about an American author who was still alive at the time it began publication.[2]

Background on early McCarthy studies and the Cormac McCarthy Society

Further information: Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy c. 1980, when he was an obscure author

By the 2010s McCarthy had entered the literary canon as one of the most highly esteemed American authors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.[3] 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 coterie of academics. Between the publication of his first novel in 1965 until about 1992, he received little critical notice—much less than his major contemporaries (i.e., those born in the 1930s) like Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon.[4] The first in-depth treatment of McCarthy's work was the monograph The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (1988) by Vereen M. Bell.[5]

Then, in 1992, McCarthy had his first major commercial and critical success almost 30 years into his writing career.[6] All the Pretty Horses became an unexpected bestselling hit, bringing a wave of interest from critics, scholars, and journalists.[7] Most of the first wave of McCarthy scholarship appeared in essay collections published as anthologies by university presses.[8] 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.[9] 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 by the University Press of Mississippi.[10]

The Cormac McCarthy Society became the central organization for the study of his fiction.[11] The literary society gathered an informal group of scholars who had attended the first academic conference on McCarthy, which took place October 1993 at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky.[12] 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.[13] 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.[1] The organization organized further conferences on the author's fiction and became a member group of the American Literature Association in 1998.[14]

Publication history

The Cormac McCarthy Society (1998–2014)

Originally, the journal was published by the Cormac McCarthy Society itself.[11] In January 1997 the McCarthy Society went online at the website cormacmccarthy.com, which had been launched two years prior by the McCarthy enthusiast Marty Priola.[14] Society members began self-publishing scholarly articles on the website by 1998.[15] At this stage, the website's journal section was more of an informal repository for McCarthy scholarship than a regular periodical.[16]

The first print edition of The Cormac McCarthy Journal appeared in 2001.[15] The Society published new issues of the journal on a roughly annual basis.[1] The journal became a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.[17] The position of editor was mostly held by John Wegner of Angelo State University from its first issue until about 2009.[18] During this timespan, several other scholars stepped in to handle the role of editor as needed.[19] The online journal moved from the McCarthy society's website to the Texas Digital Library.[20] Stacey Peebles of Centre College took over as editor in 2010.[21]

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.[22] It continued to be formally affiliated with the Cormac McCarthy Society.[23] 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.[24] 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."[22] 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. The print journal began publishing two issues a year in 2016.[15]

By the time of McCarthy's death in 2023, The Cormac McCarthy Journal remained the only periodical dedicated to the author and his works.[11] Also at that time, 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.[2]

Content

The Cormac McCarthy Journal is the central publication in McCarthy studies.[25] The journal publishes articles about the works of Cormac McCarthy, as well as adaptations of his works and other relevant texts.[23] Beyond literary criticism, articles of historical and biographical scholarship have also been an important focus of the journal. Journal contributions in this area by the Knoxville, Tennessee-based writer Wesley Morgan have been especially noted; these include coverage of McCarthy's high school years, documentation of real-life people who provided inspiration for characters in Suttree (1979), and a detailed tracing of the route taken by the characters in The Road (2006) based on close reading of geographical landmarks.[26]

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 had also received significant attention.[27] In the journal's first issue, an article by Dianne C. Luce—who was then-president of the McCarthy Society—remarked that scholarship up to that time had prioritized the author's more recent Westerns, starting with Blood Meridian and continuing with The Border Trilogy, while tending to overlook his Southern works: the novels The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree, and the dramas The Gardener's Son (1977) and The Stonemason (1995).[28] Subsequent articles in the journal on these works renewed interest in this period of McCarthy's writing.[29]

Book cover of Suttree
Suttree (1979)
Book cover of The Road
The Road (2006)
The Cormac McCarthy Journal has published special issues focused on the novels Suttree and The Road.

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.[30] 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".[31] An essay collection on Suttree, expanding on the special issue with additional papers from the 25th-anniversary conference, was eventually published in 2013.[32] 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."[33]

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.[34] 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,[35] Kirkus Reviews,[36] and the Knoxville News Sentinel, the last of which had originally printed two of the articles republished by The Cormac McCarthy Journal.[37]

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.[43]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Frye 2017, p. 4.
  2. ^ a b Shelton 2023; see Philip Roth Studies (ISSN 1940-5278) and the James Dickey Review (ISSN 2166-4382).
  3. ^ Frye 2017, p. 23.
  4. ^ Frye 2017, p. 2.
  5. ^ Peebles 2020, p. 317.
  6. ^ Arnold & Luce 1999, p. 8.
  7. ^ Luce 2001, pp. 7–8; Peebles 2020, p. 317.
  8. ^ Frye 2017, pp. 4–5.
  9. ^ Monk 2013, p. 116.
  10. ^ Peebles 2020, p. 317; Vieth 2012, p. 37; Arnold & Luce 1999.
  11. ^ a b c Frye 2022.
  12. ^ Peebles 2020, p. 318; Vieth 2012, p. 38.
  13. ^ Frye 2017, pp. 3–4.
  14. ^ a b Arnold & Luce 1999, p. 13.
  15. ^ a b c d e f Peebles 2020, p. 318.
  16. ^ Yarbrough & Peebles 2021, 16:41–17:03 (Peebles: "As a natural outgrowth of some of these regular conferences, they started publishing essays online, really in an online journal, kind of a repository of interesting pieces. It was not particularly formalized, but it was still a place where you could go and find this stuff").
  17. ^ Texas Digital Library staff 2010.
  18. ^ Wegner 2001, p. 4; Park 2009.
  19. ^ Yarbrough & Peebles 2021, 17:38–17:51 (Peebles: "The editorship changed hands a few times. It kinda [went to] whoever was willing, right? ... John Wegner handled it for a number of years and did really well with it").
  20. ^ Wegner 2009, p. iii; Park 2009.
  21. ^ Flyn 2019.
  22. ^ a b McWilliams 2014.
  23. ^ a b Brown, Senf & Stockstill 2018, p. 66.
  24. ^ Peebles 2015, p. 1.
  25. ^ Peebles & West 2021, "Critical Reception".
  26. ^ Arnold 2008, p. xiii (fn. 4); Peebles 2020, pp. 320–321; Peebles & West 2021, "Biography"; Shannon 2017.
  27. ^ Monk 2013, p. 115.
  28. ^ Luce 2001, pp. 7–9.
  29. ^ Peebles 2020, p. 316.
  30. ^ Arnold 2005, pp. 6–7.
  31. ^ Josyph 2010, p. 41.
  32. ^ Wallach 2013, p. iii.
  33. ^ Vieth 2012, pp. 42–43.
  34. ^ Luce & Turpin 2022, pp. 108–135.
  35. ^ Harris 2022.
  36. ^ Schaub 2022.
  37. ^ Turner 2022.
  38. ^ EBSCO n.d.
  39. ^ Clarivate n.d.
  40. ^ Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills n.d.
  41. ^ De Gruyter n.d.
  42. ^ ProQuest n.d.
  43. ^ Clarivate 2023.

Sources

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