Since the release of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965, Cormac McCarthy’s characters, intricate plots, and sometimes forbidding settings have captivated the attention of countless readers while exploring deep philosophical problems, including that of human agency and free will. This multiauthor volume places the full range of his novels in historical, literary, and cultural contexts and shifts the focus of critical engagement to questions of determinism, fatalism, and free will. Essayists over the course of eleven chapters show how McCarthy’s protagonists and antagonists often confront grotesque realities and destinies, and find themselves prey to incessant subconscious and uncontrollable forces. In the process, these scholars reveal that McCarthy’s works arrive thoroughly tinctured with religious complexities, ambiguities of ancient and modern thinking, and profoundly splintered notions of morality, freedom, and ethics. Consequently, McCarthy’s philosophical depth, mastery of language, and sometimes shocking psychological analysis are brought into sharp focus for longtime readers. With new scholarship from eminent critics, an accessible style, and precise attention to the lesser-known works, Cormac McCarthy’s Violent Destinies re-introduces the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist’s work under the twin themes of fatalism and determinism. 

In the first half of the nineteenth century, England became quite literally a world on wheels. The sweeping technological changes wrought by the railways, steam-powered factory engines, and progressively more sophisticated wheeled conveyances of all types produced a corresponding revolution in Victorian iconography: the image of the wheel emerged as a dominant trope for power, modernity, and progress.

In Fortune’s Wheel, an original and illuminating study, Elizabeth Campbell explores the ways in which Charles Dickens appropriated and made central to his novels the dominant symbol of his age. Between 1840 and 1860, a transformation took place in Dickens’ thinking about gender and time, and this revolution is recorded in iconographic representations of the goddess Fortune and wheel imagery that appear in his work.

Drawing on a rich history of both literary and visual representations of Fortune, Professor Campbell argues that Dickens’ contribution to both the iconographic and narrative traditions was to fuse the classical image of the wheel with the industrial one. As the wheel was increasingly identified as the official Victorian symbol for British industrial and economic progress, Dickens reacted by employing this icon to figure a more pessimistic historical vision—as the tragic symbol for human fate in the nineteenth century.

Fortune’s Wheel ably portrays the concept that, in both text and illustrations, images of fortune and the wheel in Dickens’ work record his abandonment of a linear, progressive, and arguably masculine view of history to embrace a cyclical model that has been identified with “women’s time.”