Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Preface vii
4. Note on Quotations from Mason & Dixon ix
5. The Rounds of History
6. Introduction: The Times of Mason & Dixon 1
7. 1: “The Space that may not be seen”: The Form of Historicity in Mason & Dixon 25
8. Consumption Then and Now
9. 2: The Sweetness of Immorality: Mason & Dixon and the American Sins of Consumption 49
10. 3: Consumption on the Frontier: Food and Sacrament in Mason & Dixon 77
11. Space and Power
12. 4: “America was the only place . . .”: American Exceptionalism and the Geographic Politics of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon 101
13. 5: Postmodernism at Sea: The Quest for Longitude in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before 125
14. Enlightenment Microhistories
15. 6: Haunting and Hunting: Bodily Resurrection and the Occupation of History in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon 147
16. 7: “Our Madmen, our Paranoid”: Enlightened Communities and the Mental State in Mason & Dixon 171
17. 8: General Wolfe and the Weavers: Re-envisioning History in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon 185
18. Works Cited 199
19. Notes on the Contributors 213
20. Index 215