Mannerist Fiction Pathologies Of Space From Rabelais To Pynchon

Time and again, Donoghue explains, scientific and literary paradigm shifts have occurred in parallel. Rabelais and Jonson wrote in the aftermath of changes in the western sense of space wrought by Copernicus and the voyages of discovery, Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade in the age of Newton, Thomas Pynchon in the age of Einstein. With his analysis, Donoghue establishes disfigurement and deformation as perennial sources of literary fascination."--pub. desc.