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.

The Crying of Lot 49 is widely recognized as a significant contemporary work that frames the desire for meaning and the quest for knowledge within the social and political contexts of the '50s and '60s in America. In the introduction to this collection of original essays on Thomas Pynchon's important novel, Patrick O'Donnell discusses the background and critical reception of the novel. Further essays by five experts on contemporary literature examine the novel's "semiotic regime" or the way in which it organizes signs; the comparison of postmodernist Pynchon and the influential South American writer, Jorge Luis Borges; metaphor in the novel; the novel's narrative strategies; and the novel within the cultural contexts of American Puritanism and the Beat movement. Together, these essays provide an examination of the novel within its literary, historical, and scientific contexts.

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 contains, which cumulatively address all of Pynchon's novels from V. (1963) to Bleeding Edge (2013), investigate such topics as the imbrication of gender and power, sexual abuse and the writing of sex, the gendering of violence, and the shifting representation of the family. Providing a wealth of new approaches to the centrality of sex and gender in Pynchon's work, the collection opens up new avenues for Pynchon studies as a whole.

Thomas Pynchon helped pioneer the postmodern aesthetic. His formidable body of work challenges readers to think and perceive in ways that anticipate--with humor, insight, and cogency--much that has emerged in the field of literary theory over the past few decades. For David Cowart, Pynchon's most profound teachings are about history--history as myth, as rhetorical construct, as false consciousness, as prologue, as mirror, and as seedbed of national and literary identities. In one encyclopedic novel after another, Pynchon has reconceptualized historical periods that he sees as culturally definitive. Examining Pynchon's entire body of work, Cowart offers an engaging, metahistorical reading of V.; an exhaustive analysis of the influence of German culture in Pynchon's early work, with particular emphasis on Gravity's Rainbow; and a critical spectroscopy of those dark stars, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. He defends the California fictions The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice as roman fleuve chronicling the decade in which the American tapestry began to unravel. Cowart ends his study by considering Pynchon's place in literary history. Cowart argues that Pynchon has always understood the facticity of historical narrative and the historicity of storytelling--not to mention the relations of both story and history to myth. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History offers a deft analysis of the problems of history as engaged by our greatest living novelist and argues for the continuity of Pynchon's historical vision.

Throughout his works, Thomas Pynchon uses various animal characters to narrate fables that are vital to postmodernism and ecocriticism. Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism examines case studies of animal representation in Pynchon’s texts, such as alligators in the sewer in V.; the alligator purse in Bleeding Edge; dolphins in the Miami Seaquarium in The Crying of Lot 49; dodoes, pigs, and octopuses in Gravity’s Rainbow; Bigfoot and Godzilla in Vineland and Inherent Vice; and preternatural dogs and mythical worms in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. Through this exploration, Keita Hatooka illuminates how radically and imaginatively the legendary novelist depicts his empathy for nonhuman beings. Furthermore, by conducting a comparative study of Pynchon’s narratives and his contemporary documentarians and thinkers, Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales leads readers to draw great lessons from the fables, which stimulate our ecocritical thought for tomorrow.