Rob McInroy's doctoral thesis for his PhD at the University of Hull was on American novelist, Cormac McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy seeks to understand human community, the bonds of love which mark humanity, and the impact when those bonds are broken. Throughout his career, however, his work has increasingly focused on a quest for some spiritual core to existence, unfolding against a backdrop of modernity in crisis. These preoccupations can be read in the context of St Augustine’s City of Man and the search for passage into the City of God: there is the dualistic nature of man, with his ability to love and his capacity for destructiveness, driven by the promise of salvation beyond the material realm.

There is a sustained sense of hostility in McCarthy’s fiction to modernity. The thesis uses the philosophy of Eric Voegelin to demonstrate that McCarthy’s fiction synthesises elements of what Voegelin describes as modern gnosticism, a sense that modern humanity has usurped God and seeks to establish an immanent heaven-on-earth. These preoccupations begin to dominate McCarthy’s writing and, in his continual search for passage to the City of God, he begins to lose those notions of community which informed his earlier work.