Constructed on no Known Paradigm: Novelistic Form in the Southern City in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree

This paper examines the relationship between the southern city, as represented by Cormac McCarthy's Knoxville, and the properties of his novel Suttree, developing this thread through consideration of the book's frequently rough texture, the complexity of its narrative structure(s), and the unusual position of its central figure relative to McCarthy's earlier Appalachia novels. Knoxville emerges less as an alternative to an agrarian South or an instantiation of the urban/hinterlands binary than as a perpetually incomplete pastiche bound to the difficulties of writing in and about a continuously evolving set of southern landscapes.