Postmodern literature - Ian Gregson

A fascinating variety of writing has been produced in the period since the Second World War. Much of this can be helpfully understood by reference to postmodernism. Many important texts in the period, however, are distorted when this label is applied to them, and others are actively anti-postmodernist.

Postmodern Literature accessibly defines postmodernism, compares and contrasts it with modernism, and places it in its historical context, especially in relation to crucial phenomena like Auschwitz, the clashing of ideologies, and the prevalence of propaganda and misinformation. It discusses the major theorists of postmodernism, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, and demonstrates how their theories illuminate the work of postmodernist writers such as John Ashbery, Walter Abish and Angela Carter. It defines the key postmodern theories of language, race and gender - poststructuralism, postcolonialism and feminism - and explores their often fraught relationships with postmodernism in relation to important writers such as Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich and Salman Rushdie.

The book also discusses important postmodern phenomena which are inadequately represented by postmodernist theories. It draws attention, for example, to important strands of realism in contemporary writing, and to a continuing discussion of Nature which has been crucial in the culture, for example in ecological anxieties and questionings of genetic modification, cloning and so on. This discussion has been consistently under-represented in the theory but has been a crucial theme in the literature such as in the work of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Margaret Atwood.