Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails: Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Thomas Pynchon’s V.
Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails marks the first in-depth examination of Pynchon’s debut novel, which was immediately recognized as a breakthrough masterpiece. The eight essays collected in the volume provide both scholars and avid readers with new and original insights into a too-often underestimated work that, probably even more than Gravity’s Rainbow, established Pynchon as one of the great masters of twentieth-century American literature.
This book deliberately privileges a multidisciplinary and transnational approach, encompassing collaborations from a particularly international and diverse academic context. As such, this volume offers a multifaceted pattern of expanding investigation that tackles the novel’s apparently chaotic but meticulously organized structure by rereading it in the light of recent US and European history and economics, as well as by exploring its many real and imagined locations. Not only are the essays brought together here revelatory of Pynchon’s way of working, but they also tell us something about our own ways of approaching his fiction.
Paolo Simonetti is Research Fellow at “Sapienza” Università di Roma. He has published extensively on historical fiction, postmodernist and contemporary American literature, including comics and graphic novels. He has edited the complete works of Bernard Malamud for “I Meridiani” Mondadori.
Umberto Rossi is a teacher, independent scholar, literary journalist, and translator. He has published two monographs on Philip K. Dick and on war literature, and several essays on Pynchon, Dick, Heller, Hemingway, Evangelisti, Ballard, Disch, Lethem, science fiction, and postmodernism.
“Every essay here is a jewel, replete with fresh insight that is the more impressive for being carefully oriented to the previous half century’s critical writing about Pynchon and his first novel. In addition to superb essays of their own, Simonetti and Rossi have gathered new articles by some of Pynchon scholarship’s most fertile intellects: Luc Herman and John M. Krafft, Tore Rye Andersen, Jennifer Backman, Mario Faraone, Stipe Grgas, and Clément Lévy. The collection includes a thorough bibliography, including secondary materials that bear out one’s perception that Pynchon’s appeal for literary scholars is truly international. Indeed, this volume alone features work by Italian, American, Belgian, Croatian, Danish, and French scholars. The articles presented here abound in fine-grained readings of individual chapters, yet the larger structure and meanings of Pynchon’s endlessly fascinating novel are never neglected. Connections abound, withal, between V. and its successors. These magisterial essays are the work of critics who know not only the entire Pynchon canon but its place in the great library of contemporary letters. [It is] an important book.”
David Cowart
Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities at the University of South Carolina and author of Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion and Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History
“Fifty years after its publication, Thomas Pynchon’s V. continues to haunt our waking minds. The essays in Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails expertly situate afresh Pynchon’s novel amid its historical, theoretical and geographical contexts. Simonetti and Rossi have done a great service in reminding us of the nuance of this first great text, even as new Pynchon material continues to appear in the twenty-first century.”
Dr Martin Paul Eve
Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London; Chief Editor, Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon
Tore Rye Andersen
Jennifer Backman
Mario Faraone
Stipe Grgas
Luc Herman
John M. Krafft
Clement Levy
Umberto Rossi
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