The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption

Book excerpt: 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.