Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender [Paperback]

Ali Chetwynd (Editor)
ALI CHETWYND is an assistant professor and chair of the English Department at the American University of Iraq Sulaimani. His work has appeared in College Literature, English Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Joanna Freer (Editor)
JOANNA FREER is a lecturer in American literature at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture and is currently an editor of the journal Orbit: A Journal of American Literature.

Georgios Maragos (Editor)
GEORGIOS MARAGOS is an independent scholar from Athens, Greece. His work has appeared in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature.

Thomas Pynchon’s fiction has been considered masculinist, misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether Pynchon’s representations of women are sexist, feminist, or reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether queer identities are celebrated or mocked, and whether his departures from realist convention express masculinist elitism or critique the gendering of genre.

Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender reframes these debates. As the first book-length investigation of Pynchon’s writing to put the topics of sex and gender at its core, it moves beyond binary debates about whether to see Pynchon as liberatory or conservative, instead examining how his preoccupation with sex and gender conditions his fiction’s whole worldview. The essays it conl£Y