Steven Weisenburger (Book order)

Steven Weisenburger Book order

Steven Weisenburger delves into American literary and cultural history, with a particular focus on the cultural history of race from the 19th century onward. His research and teaching interests encompass United States history and fictions, narrative theory, African American literature, and the cultural history of racism and white supremacy in America. Weisenburger has also published and taught extensively on contemporary fiction and satire, showcasing a broad engagement with diverse literary forms and critical perspectives.

A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel

412 pages
15 hours of reading

4.1(204)Add rating

Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story.Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow - how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty "Great Books of the Twentieth Century."