A01=Stefanie Heine
American studies
Author_Stefanie Heine
Blood Meridian
Category=DS
Category=DSK
Category=DSM
Category=WN
close reading
contemporary literature
Cormac McCarthy
desert
ecocriticism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
formless resemblance
genetic criticism
geology
inorganic aesthetics
liminality
literary geomorphology
literary theory
lithic matter
materiality of language
New Materialism
tangentiality
textual studies
weak more-than-human agency
writing process
Product details
- ISBN 9781647792312
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Mar 2026
- Publisher: University of Nevada Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Tangential Terrains is an ecocritical study of the work of Cormac McCarthy, focusing primarily on his depictions of the desert and inorganic nature in Blood Meridian. Close readings of previously unexamined archival manuscripts and drafts shed new light on McCarthy's compositional processes, revealing how the development of written matter in the novel-in-progress can correspond to geological processes like erosion, erratics, stratification, and continental drift.
Blood Meridian's emergent geoaesthetics reveals forces operating according to other-than-human principles, as literary desert terrains retain a passive resistance, or weak agency, which presents a radical disturbance of anthropocentrism, mirrored in the novel's style. Though the mediated unstable deserts in Blood Meridian defy appropriation, they are neither untouched nor untouchable: the borderlands bear the wounds and "blood meridians" of a non-chronological history of violence, tangential to the massacres of Native American and Mexican peoples depicted in the novel.
Stefanie Heine's reading of Blood Meridian offers a crucial contribution to and intervention in contemporary ecocriticism, Anthropocene criticism, and New Materialist theories, encouraging readers to critically rethink customary notions of entanglement, kinship, and agency.
Blood Meridian's emergent geoaesthetics reveals forces operating according to other-than-human principles, as literary desert terrains retain a passive resistance, or weak agency, which presents a radical disturbance of anthropocentrism, mirrored in the novel's style. Though the mediated unstable deserts in Blood Meridian defy appropriation, they are neither untouched nor untouchable: the borderlands bear the wounds and "blood meridians" of a non-chronological history of violence, tangential to the massacres of Native American and Mexican peoples depicted in the novel.
Stefanie Heine's reading of Blood Meridian offers a crucial contribution to and intervention in contemporary ecocriticism, Anthropocene criticism, and New Materialist theories, encouraging readers to critically rethink customary notions of entanglement, kinship, and agency.
Stefanie Heine is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of both Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse: Virginia Woolf's Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot's Image and Poetics of Breathing: Modern Literature's Syncope, among other books.
