From the Civil War to the Apocalypse

[Dave Monroe]

>From Timothy Parrish, From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern
History and American Fiction (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2008),
Ch. 4, "Thomas Pynchon's Maon & Dixon: Drawing a Line in the Sands of
History," pp. 150-92:

"Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon imagines an America other than the one
we have inherited.... In form and content, the book clearly parodies
popular histories ... in that it rejects the assumption that American
history can be reduced to the tale of its founding by a handful of
great and divinely inspired men.  Replete with thousands of obscure
facts and numerous impossible happenings in a kind of reductio ad
absurdum of conventional historiographic practice, Mason & Dixon
suggests that by 1786 U.S. history was already doomed to fail to
fulfill its utopian dreams.  The grid was mapped and the future
already drawn."

http://www.umass.edu/umpress/fall_07/parrish.htm

http://books.google.com/books?id=F5cJNJzaodMC