The New Pynchon Studies

Description

This book captures a cross-section of the most significant recent developments in criticism on one of the most challenging authors of our time. It brings together essays by a new generation of Pynchon critics alongside some more established names in the field, building on and moving beyond existing critical paradigms in the study of Pynchon's work. In a critical landscape in which the postmodernism of Pynchon's earlier novels has been thoroughly established, this collection presents fresh analytical methodologies and new perspectives on Pynchon's fiction informed by the more expansive, globalized, and politicized network models that undergird recent advances in American literary theory and criticism. The New Pynchon Studies illustrates how Pynchon's later novels, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge, demand a re-orientation of our approach to his entire oeuvre and enables readers to trace lines of continuity and development in his writing from V. to the present day.

Joanna Freer is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Exeter. Her research approaches the work of Thomas Pynchon from a variety of political angles. Her recent publications include an essay collection co-edited with Ali Chetwynd and Georgios Maragos, Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender (2018), an article entitled 'Decolonizing America: Native Americans in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon' (2018), and the monograph Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge, 2014). A special issue of Textual Practice, co-edited with Doug Haynes and addressing Pynchon's engagement with economics, is forthcoming.

'A valuable resource for serious study of Pynchon ... Highly recommended.' L. Schachterle, Choice