A Mason & Dixon Companion

A Mason & Dixon Companion PDF Author: Brett Biebel
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820365866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Mason & Dixon might be Thomas Pynchon’s most human book. Its main characters are richly drawn, and they center the narrative. Yet the novel is also packed with historical allusions and an eighteenth-century vernacular that some readers may find difficult to navigate. A "Mason & Dixon" Companion offers this navigation line by line, unpacking Pynchon’s puns, his many references, and his pet themes. Brett Biebel provides a contextual map, episode-by-episode summaries, and page-by-page annotations explaining allusions, defining obscure vocabulary, and illuminating the book’s major themes. The goal is to help readers work their way through a difficult yet remarkably rewarding novel from one of American literature’s most significant writers. In a voice that’s both relaxed and informed, the Companion illuminates what Harold Bloom called “Pynchon’s late masterpiece.” It crystallizes the prescience of Mason & Dixon, situating the novel within Pynchon’s broader oeuvre, while being fun to read in its own right.

A Mason & Dixon Companion

A Mason & Dixon Companion PDF Author: Brett Biebel
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820365866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mason & Dixon might be Thomas Pynchon’s most human book. Its main characters are richly drawn, and they center the narrative. Yet the novel is also packed with historical allusions and an eighteenth-century vernacular that some readers may find difficult to navigate. A "Mason & Dixon" Companion offers this navigation line by line, unpacking Pynchon’s puns, his many references, and his pet themes. Brett Biebel provides a contextual map, episode-by-episode summaries, and page-by-page annotations explaining allusions, defining obscure vocabulary, and illuminating the book’s major themes. The goal is to help readers work their way through a difficult yet remarkably rewarding novel from one of American literature’s most significant writers. In a voice that’s both relaxed and informed, the Companion illuminates what Harold Bloom called “Pynchon’s late masterpiece.” It crystallizes the prescience of Mason & Dixon, situating the novel within Pynchon’s broader oeuvre, while being fun to read in its own right.

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon PDF Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521769744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This essential Companion to Thomas Pynchon provides all the necessary tools to unlock the challenging fiction of this postmodern master.

Pet Disasters

Pet Disasters PDF Author: Claudia Mills
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0375868739
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Nine-year-old Mason's parents keep trying to get him a pet, but until he and his best friend Brody adopt a three-legged dog, he is not interested.

A Companion to V.

A Companion to V. PDF Author: J. Kerry Grant
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820322506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
To the uninitiated, Thomas Pynchon’s V. seems to defy comprehension with its open-ended and fragmented narrative, huge cast of characters (some 150 of them), and wide range of often obscure references. J. Kerry Grant’s Companion to “V.” takes us through the novel chapter by chapter, breaking through its daunting surface by summarizing events and clarifying Pynchon’s many allusions. The Companion draws extensively from existing critical and explicative work on V. to suggest the range of interpretations that the novel can support. The hundreds of notes that comprise the Companion are keyed to the three most widely cited editions of V. Most notes are interpretive, but some also provide historical and cultural contexts or help to resurrect other nuances of meaning. Because it does not constitute a particular “reading” of, or “take” on, the novel, the Companion will appeal to a wide range of users. Rather than attempting to make final sense of the novel, the Companion exposes and demystifies Pynchon’s intent to play with our conventional attitudes about fiction.

A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49

A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 PDF Author: J. Kerry Grant
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820332089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Contains more than 500 notes keyed to the "2006 Harper Perennial Modern Classics", the "1986 Harper Perennial Library", and the 1967 Bantam editions. This edition adds quotations and paraphrases drawn from criticism published since 1994. It includes more than fifty annotations that have been added and eighty annotations that have been expanded.

A Gravity's Rainbow Companion

A Gravity's Rainbow Companion PDF Author: Steven C. Weisenburger
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow--how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty "Great Books of the Twentieth Century."

Pynchon and Mason & Dixon

Pynchon and Mason & Dixon PDF Author: Brooke Horvath
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Essays on the contemporary American novelist's most recent work

The Making of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano

The Making of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano PDF Author: Frederick Asals
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820318264
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Ten years in the making, Under the Volcano is the best-known work of writer Malcolm Lowry. Published first in 1947, it is a brilliant, moving, and complex novel, perhaps the last fictional masterpiece to emerge from the modernist movement. As the years went by, Lowry's obsessive rewriting took him further and further into his book, which changed relatively little in the outer semblance of action and main characters but became utterly transformed in texture from the thin and mediocre version of 1940 to the rich tapestry of 1947. The numerous manuscripts allow a look at the processes by which Lowry created not only his masterwork but also his own reputation as a modernist genius. This study offers an extended examination of individual drafts as the novel slowly developed and, in a final chapter, an appraisal of the implications of Lowry's revisions for the book as published, an appraisal that suggests bases for new readings of Under the Volcano.

Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594659
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 885

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Book Description
Winner of the 1974 National Book Award "The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." - The New Republic “A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000.

Thomas Merton's Art of Denial

Thomas Merton's Art of Denial PDF Author: David D. Cooper
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033216X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Trappist monk and best-selling author, Thomas Merton battled constantly within himself as he attempted to reconcile two seemingly incompatible roles in life. As a devout Catholic, he took vows of silence and stability, longing for the security and closure of the monastic life. But as a writer he felt compelled to seek friendships in literary circles and success in the secular world. In Thomas Merton's Art of Denial, David D. Cooper traces Merton's attempts to reach an accommodation with himself, to find a way in which "the silence of the monk could live compatibly with the racket of the writer." From the roots of this painful division in the unsettled early years of Merton's life, to the turmoil of his directionless early adult years in which he first attempted to write, he was besieged with self-doubts. Turning to life in a monastery in Kentucky in 1941, Merton believed he would find the solitude and peace lacking in the quotidian world. But, as Merton once wrote, "An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck." Merton felt compelled to choose between life as either a less than perfect priest or a less prolific writer. Discovering in his middle years that the ideal monastic life he had envisioned was an impossibility, Merton turned his energies to abolishing war. It was in this pursuit that he finally succeeded in fusing the two sides of his life, converting his frustrated idealism into a radical humanism placed in the service of world peace. Here is a portrait of a man torn between the influence of the twentieth century and the serenity of the religious ideal, a man who used his own personal crises to guide his youthful ideals to a higher purpose.