Twentieth-century authors and filmmakers have created a pantheon of mavericks—some macho, others angst-ridden—who often cross a metaphorical boundary among the literal ones of Anglo, Native American, and Hispanic cultures. Douglas Canfield examines the concept of borders, defining them as the space between states and cultures and ideologies, and focuses on these border crossings as a key feature of novels and films about the region. Canfield begins in the Old Southwest of Faulkner's Mississippi, addressing the problem of slavery; travels west to North Texas and the infamous Gainesville Hanging of Unionists during the Civil War; and then follows scalpers into the Southwest Borderlands. He then turns to the area of the Gadsden Purchase, known for its outlaws and Indian wars, before heading south of the border for the Yaqui persecution and the Mexican Revolution. Alongside such well-known works as Go Down Moses, The Wild Bunch, Broken Arrow, Gringo Viejo, and Blood Meridian, Canfield discusses novels and films that tell equally compelling stories of the region. Protagonists face various identity crises as they attempt border crossings into other cultures or mindsets—some complete successful crossings, some go native, and some fail. He analyzes figures such as Geronimo, Doc Holliday, and Billy the Kid alongside less familiar mavericks as they struggle for identity, purpose, and justice.

The concept of North American borderlands in the cultural imagination fluctuated greatly during the Progressive Era as it was affected by similarly changing concepts of identity and geopolitical issues influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the First World War. Such shifts became especially evident in films set along the Mexican and Canadian borders as filmmakers explored how these changes simultaneously represented and influenced views of society at large. Borderland Films examines the intersection of North American borderlands and culture as portrayed through early twentieth-century cinema. Drawing on hundreds of films, Dominique Brégent-Heald investigates the significance of national borders; the ever-changing concepts of race, gender, and enforced boundaries; the racialized ideas of criminality that painted the borderlands as unsafe and in need of control; and the wars that showed how international conflict significantly influenced the United States' relations with its immediate neighbors. Borderland Films provides a fresh perspective on American cinematic, cultural, and political history and on how cinema contributed to the establishment of societal narratives in the early twentieth century.

The first book to examine McCarthya s three masterpiece novels as a cohesive whole"

The most intriguing aspect of Cormac McCarthy’s writing is the irresistible premonition that his sentences carry an exceptional potential, that after each subsequent reading they surprise us with increasingly deeper layers of meaning, which are often in complete contradiction to the readers’ initial intuitions. His novels belong to the kind that we dream about at night, that follow us and do not let themselves be forgotten. Cormac McCarthy’s prose has been read in the light of a variety of theories, ranging from Marxist criticism, the pastoral tradition, Gnostic theology, the revisionist approach to the American Western, to feminist and eco-critical methodology. The perspective offered in The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical is an existentialist theological approach, which proposes a reading of McCarthy that focuses on the issue of evil and violence as it is dealt with in his novels. “Evil,” unquestionably being a metaphysical category and, as a result, quite commonly pronounced passé, is a challenging and overwhelming topic, which nevertheless deeply concerns all of us. Boguta-Marchel’s book is therefore an attempt to confront a theme that is an unpopular object of scholarly examination and, at the same time, a commonly shared experience in the everyday life of all human beings. The book follows the pattern of an increasingly in-depth analysis of the drama of evil that is omnipresent in McCarthy’s books: from the level of the visual (grotesque images, hyperbolic depictions of violence, cinematic precision of matter-of-fact descriptions), through the level of events (circularity and repetitiveness of action, characters conceptualizing and enacting the struggle between predetermined fate and good will), to the level of the metaphysical (existential crises, grappling with the idea and the person of God, biblical allusions reappearing in the text). This way, The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical provides a complete picture of McCarthy’s contest with one of the most troublesome issues that humanity has ever faced.

"My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth." Evil is an intruder upon a world created by God and declared good. Scripture emphasizes this: laments are regularly juxtaposed with declarations of God as creator. But evil is not merely a problem for the doctrine of creation. Rather, the doctrine of creation provides a hopeful response to evil. In Evil and Creation, David J. Luy, Matthew Levering, and George Kalantzis collect essays investigating how the doctrine of creation relates to moral and physical evil. Essayists pursue philosophical and theological analyses of evil rather than neatly solving the problem of evil itself. Including contributions from Constantine Campbell, Paul Blowers, and Paul Gavrilyuk, this volume draws upon biblical and patristic voices to produce constructive theology, considering topics ranging from vanity in Ecclesiastes and its patristic interpreters to animal suffering. Readers will gain a broader appreciation of evil and how to faithfully respond to it as well as a renewed hope in God as creator and judge.

13: " In All That Dark and All That Cold": Good and Evil in No Country for Old Men -- 14: "All Things of Grace and Beauty": The Presence of the Sacred in The Road -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Back Cover

"The book explores how border subjects have been created and disputed in cultural narratives of the Texas-Mexico border, comparing and analyzing Mexican, Mexican American, and Anglo literary representations of the border"--Provided by publisher.