Overview

The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption: A Facsimile Edition reproduces William Pynchon's rare 1650 theological treatise about the Atonement. Written in the dialogue genre and deemed heretical by Boston orthodoxy, the book was burned on the city Commons. More than three hundred years later Meritorious Price is transformed in On Preterition, a fictional counterpart that is inscribed in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a landmark in the contemporary American novel. The reworking of the Puritan past in this recent postmodernist novel in part results from Thomas Pynchon's direct descent from his Puritan ancestor, but more than that, it points at important continuities in American literature. Introductory essays by Michael W. Vella, Lance Schachterle, and Louis Mackey explore questions of genealogy, theology, and postmodernism in the presentation of this facsimile edition aimed at scholars and readers of both Pynchons.

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9780820417608

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Reviews

I welcome the fact that (the editors) are making this rare work available...It is very much concerned with the issue of textual exegesis and that gives it a particular interest for contemporary students. Moreover, with earlier notions of the monolithic nature of American Puritanism now yielding to a sense of the political and theological diversity that existed within that movement, texts such as 'Meritorious Price' that were previously regarded as eccentric take on greater importance. I am intrigued by the suggestion that 'Gravity's Rainbow' not only plays off against the Pynchon family career and the existence of 'Meritorious Price' but is, in effect, a postmodernist rewriting of 'Meritorious Price'. (Larzer Ziff, Johns Hopkins University) The editors are to be congratulated for bringing to our attention a rare seventeenth-century New England tract that also figures in the work of one of our greatest contemporary authors. Scholars of early American literature and culture will be pleased to have so little known an example of radical New England Puritanism in a convenient format and with a detailed introduction. (Philip F. Gura, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) It's an odd match when students of American seventeenth-century and postmodernist writing come together over a text. But here it is. We're very much in your debt for recovering it, some 342 years after that first debut on the Boston Commons. (Steven Weisenburger, University of Kentucky)

Author Information

The Editors: Michael W. Vella is Professor of American Literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he teaches Puritan and postmodern American literature. Lance Schachterle is Professor of English and Director of International Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Louis Mackey is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches literature and philosophy. All three professors have numerous publications and share a scholarly interest in Thomas Pynchon's works.

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