Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

Gregory Marks (La Trobe University)

Ed. by Sofia Ahlberg, Uppsala University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1997

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

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So, one day, into Delaware’s great Basin, With strange Machinery sail Mr. Mason, And Mr. Dixon, by the Falmouth Packet, Connected, as with some invis’ble Bracket,— Sharing a Fate, directed by the Stars, To mark the Earth with geometrick Scars (Pynchon 1998, 257).

This lyric attends the arrival of astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon in Philadelphia, in the year 1763, dispatched from England to delineate the borders between Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Measuring their progress by the stars, proceeding chain by chain, they will chart a line into the continent which will soon bear their names and will come to represent the contradiction between human freedom and the ownership of persons as property that defines the American experiment. A century hence, the

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3294 words

Citation: Marks, Gregory. "Mason & Dixon". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 September 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=30544, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

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