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.

This book captures a cross-section of the most significant recent developments in criticism on one of the most challenging authors of our time. It brings together essays by a new generation of Pynchon critics alongside some more established names in the field, building on and moving beyond existing critical paradigms in the study of Pynchon's work. In a critical landscape in which the postmodernism of Pynchon's earlier novels has been thoroughly established, this collection presents fresh analytical methodologies and new perspectives on Pynchon's fiction informed by the more expansive, globalized, and politicized network models that undergird recent advances in American literary theory and criticism. The New Pynchon Studies illustrates how Pynchon's later novels, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge, demand a re-orientation of our approach to his entire oeuvre and enables readers to trace lines of continuity and development in his writing from V. to the present day.

Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture employs the revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.

Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture employs the revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.

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.