Title: Review of Thomas Pynchon in Contemporary China

Abstract: Since 1991 when domestic scholar Yi Dan published the first paper on Thomas Pynchon in Foreign Literature Review in China, contemporary studies of Pynchon in China have gone through nearly thirty years of study. The image of Pynchon has changed from unknown black humorist to a core icon of American post-modern writer, accompaned by several turns of domestic literary criticism in the scholarship on him. On the one hand, the scholarship covers theme studies from perceptual “quest” to rational “entropy”, stylistic studies from “black humor” to “narrative” and the expanding of studies from historical dimension to spatial dimension. The last one is of significance for Pynchon’s becoming a core icon of post-modernism; on the other hand, the scholarship shows that American literature studies in the Chinese context display a trend of interdisciplinarity, which is closely related to the overall trend of humanities and the whole cognition level of domestic academicians.

Keywords: Thomas Pynchon, critical reception, Chinese context

Authors: Hairong Zhang, Professor, College of International Languages and Cultures, Hohai University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China; Mengyun Li, College of International Languages and Cultures, Hohai University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.