Postmodern literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Postmodern literature arose after World War II as a series of reactions against the perceived failure, or also extension, of modernist literature; the term is not a reference to the time of postmodernity, but the reaction against modernism called postmodernism.
Just like postmodernism itself, it is hard to define; Wagner offers this approach: "Postmodernism, then, can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. In what follows, the term "postmodernist" is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while "post- modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative."
