American Postmodernity

The Editor: Ian D. Copestake (1969) was born on the Wirral and graduated from Warwick University in 1991 with a BA Hons degree in English and American literature. He completed an M.A. in American Literature at University of Leeds (1992-1993) and later received a Ph.D. at the University of Leeds (1993-2000). His thesis subject was the poetry of William Carlos Williams (twentieth-century American poetry).He is a research fellow in American literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. The author of various articles and reviews relating to his interests in contemporary American fiction and twentieth-century poetry, he is also editor of Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams.

• Contents: Ian D. Copestake: Introduction. Postmodern Reflections: The Image of an Absent Author – David Seed: Media System in The Crying of Lot 49 – David Dickson: Pynchon’s Vineland and «That Fundamental Agreement in What is Good and Proper»: What Happens when we Need to Change it? – David Thoreen: In which «Acts Have Consequences»: Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon’s Recent Fiction – Francisco Collado Rodríguez: Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction and the Unstable Reconciliation of Opposites – William B. Millard: Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction – Martin Saar/Christian Skirke: «The Realm of Velocity and Spleen»: Reading Hybrid Life in Mason & Dixon – John Heon: Surveying the Punch Line: Jokes and their Relation to the American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner Notes to Spiked! – Robert L. McLaughlin: Surveying, Mapmaking and Representation in Mason & Dixon – Ian D. Copestake: «Off the Deep End Again»: Sea-Consciousness and Insanity in The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon.

«... the collection is an important contribution to Pynchon studies.» (Manfred Kopp, Amerikastudien/American Studies)«...this perceptive book of essays is a welcome contribution to Pynchon studies, and to the study of contemporary U.S. literature and culture.» (Erik S. Roraback, Pynchon Notes)