Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History

[Albert Rolls]

Thanks. It was listed for end of January release. 


-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>Sent: Dec 19, 2011 3:34 PM
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History
>
>Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History
>David Cowart
>
>Page count: 224
>Trim size: 6 x 9
>
>Cloth
> List price: $59.95
> 978-0-8203-4062-3
> 1/15/2012
>
>Paper
> List price: $24.95
> 978-0-8203-4063-0
> 1/15/2012
>
>The work of an American master assessed fifty years after publication
>of his first novel, V.
>
>Reviews
>
>"Soon it will be fifty years since the debut of Thomas Pynchon's award
>winning first novel V., in 1963. During those decades this famous
>writer has succeeded doggedly and amazingly in the task of secreting
>himself and his private life from the public eye and has published six
>more novels, a collection of short fiction, and various bits and
>blurbs of prose. With that anniversary Pynchon will turn seventy-six.
>The time is nigh, then, for critics to reckon with the body of his
>work, its place in the history of American literature, and of the
>novel. Cowart is certainly the one to do that work."
>'
> —Steven Weisenburger, author of A Gravity's Rainbow Companion
>
> "With his 1980 Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion, David Cowart
>produced one of the earliest sustained scholarly studies of Pynchon's
>fiction, and his work has remained among the best of its kind: not
>only intelligent, learned, and sophisticated, but also graceful,
>charming and accessible. Here he takes Pynchon's historical
>imagination and projects as his central focus, understanding them as
>integral to, not at odds with, Pynchon's manifest postmodernism. The
>Pynchon he constructs is politically engaged and something of a
>humanist, with a decidedly if ambiguously spiritual bent. To do
>justice to all these facets of a complex author is quite an
>achievement. This book is the real thing."
>
> —John M. Krafft, Miami University
>
>Description
>
>Thomas Pynchon helped pioneer the postmodern aesthetic. His formidable
>body of work challenges readers to think and perceive in ways that
>anticipate—with humor, insight, and cogency—much that has emerged in
>the field of literary theory over the past few decades. For David
>Cowart, Pynchon’s most profound teachings are about history—history as
>myth, as rhetorical construct, as false consciousness, as prologue, as
>mirror, and as seedbed of national and literary identities.
>
>In one encyclopedic novel after another, Pynchon has reconceptualized
>historical periods that he sees as culturally definitive. Examining
>Pynchon’s entire body of work, Cowart offers an engaging,
>metahistorical reading of V.; an exhaustive analysis of the influence
>of German culture in Pynchon’s early work, with particular emphasis on
>Gravity’s Rainbow; and a critical spectroscopy of those dark stars,
>Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. He defends the California fictions
>The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice as roman fleuve
>chronicling the decade in which the American tapestry began to
>unravel. Cowart ends his study by considering Pynchon’s place in
>literary history.
>
>Cowart argues that Pynchon has always understood the facticity of
>historical narrative and the historicity of storytelling—not to
>mention the relations of both story and history to myth. Thomas
>Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History offers a deft analysis of the
>problems of history as engaged by our greatest living novelist and
>argues for the continuity of Pynchon’s historical vision.
>
>http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/thomas_pynchon/