The Multiple Worlds of Pynchons Mason & Dixon
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491_9781571134110
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When Thomas Pynchons novel Mason & Dixon was published in 1997, it marked a deep shift in Pynchons career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchons novels had been socially and politically aware: V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravitys Rainbow, and Vineland are all marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor; Pynchonesque has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns - and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the military-industrial complex, which may or may not, according to Pynchons wild and widely populated casts of characters, be the definitive feature of America. In short, Pynchons novels were preeminently postmodern. Mason & Dixon moved beyond postmodernism to use the same style, wit, and erudition to re-create an eighteenth century when America was being formed as both the place and the idea we have come to know. Pynchons focus on the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line and the governmental and scientific entities responsible for it makes a clearer statement than any of his previous novels about the slavery and imperialism at the heart of the Enlightenment, and Mason & Dixon levels a dark and hilarious critique at this America. The novel was a New York Times bestseller. ~~ This volume of new essays studies the interface between eighteenth- and twentieth-century culture both in Pynchons novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchons work, not only because it deals with his most recent novel, but also because the contributors take up the linkages between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in studies that are as concerned with culture as with the literary text itself. ~~ The scope of the volume is indicated by its four sections: The Rounds of History, about historiography and narrative temporality; Consumption Then and Now, which deals with slavery, trade, and
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