Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives is the first book that critically addresses Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day, published in 2006. The nineteen essays collected in this volume employ a large variety of approaches to this massive novel and also take it as an opportunity to reevaluate Pynchon's earlier works, analyzing Against the Day in relation to V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, and Pynchon's short stories and essays. The authors-younger as well as established scholars from eleven countries-address these works with regard to...

Mark Z. Danielewski is routinely hailed as the most exciting author in contemporary American literature, and he is celebrated by critics and fans alike. Revolutionary Leaves collects essays that have come out of the first academic conference on Danielewski's fiction that took place in Munich in 2011, which brought together younger and established scholars to discuss his works from a variety of perspectives. Addressing his major works House of Leaves (2000) and Only Revolutions (2006), the texts are as multifaceted as the novels they analyze, and they incorporate ideas of (post)structuralism,...

This volume introduces a new concept, one that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture. From the works of David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway to fanfiction and The Simpsons, from natural disasters to 9/11 and beyond, the essays find the unpopular across media and genres, analyzing the politics and aesthetics of a side to culture that has been overlooked by previous theories and methods in cultural studies.