Introduction

Summary

Thomas Pynchon has long had a place in the pantheon of Great American Writers. His status lies in the scope of his work – the number of publications, the prodigious detail and expansiveness of his topics – as well as the sheer quality of his writing, all of which quickly led to comparisons with Herman Melville and James Joyce. His writing is widely taught (as part of required literature survey courses at universities, for example), and remains the subject of many scholarly articles, dissertations, and monographs not just in the United States and other English-speaking countries, as one might expect, but also across Europe and Asia. According to the database of publications compiled on Vheissu.net, more than 400 doctoral dissertations have been accepted and more than 100 monographs and essay collections published on his writing already, mostly in English but also in other languages such as Spanish, Italian, and German, with a handful from publishers in Korea, China, and Japan. However, Pynchon is not just a canonical writer within scholarly research and teaching communities. Because of their scope and imaginative richness, his novels also have great appeal outside academia, and many devoted readers share their interest in his novels on websites dedicated to exploring his work. It is to help all such readers and students that Thomas Pynchon in Context brings together forty-four essays by some of the foremost specialists in the field, providing the most comprehensive resource yet published on the many ways in which his writing engages the wider world.