Violence, Power, and the Collapse of Manifest Destiny in Blood Meridian

Keyword

Manifest Destiny; Blood Meridian; Violence; Imperialism; Cormac McCarthy

References

Blood, H. (2009). Bloom’s modern critical views: Cormac McCarthy. Infobase Publishing.

Campbell, N. (1997). Beyond reckoning: Cormac McCarthy’s version of the west in Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. Critique, 39(4), 55-64.

Cooper, L. (2025). The influence of Jacob Boehme’s Aurora on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The Explicator, 1-6.

Cornwell, G. (2015). Ambivalent national epic: McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56(5), 531-544.

Curtis, D. (2005). McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The Explicator, 63(2), 112-114.

Douglas, C. (2025). A synthesis of the Christian, gnostic, and evolutionary readings of Blood Meridian. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 23(1), 19-50.

Foner, E. (2019). Give me liberty! An American history. W. W. Norton & Company.

Hillier, R. (2013). The judge’s molar: Infanticide and the meteorite in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 26(2), 76-81.

Hillier, R. (2024). A literary forerunner to Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: S. Behrman in Frank Norris’s The Octopus. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 37(4), 625-631.

Horsman, R. (1981). Race and manifest destiny: The origins of American racial Anglo-Saxonism. Harvard University Press.

Kollin, S. (2001). Genre and the geographies of violence: Cormac McCarthy and the contemporary western. Contemporary Literature, 42(3), 557-588.

McCarthy, C. (1985). The blood meridian, or the evening redness in the west. Picador Collection.

Meed, D. (2002). The Mexican War 1846-1848. Osprey.

Phillips, D. (1996). History and the ugly facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. American Literature, 68(2), 433-460.

Sayers, W. (2024). Cosmic egg and infant demiurge: Antecedents of McCarthy’s Judge Holden (Blood Meridian). ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 37(3), 450-455.

Sinykin, D. (2020). American literature and the long downturn: Neoliberal apocalypse. Oxford University Press.

Copyright

© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/