Post-modernism

Home » Movements home page » Post-modernism

Postmodernism is the movement that responded to the political, cultural and intellectual developments that arose in the late 1960s, as well as to the preceding literary movements. Though I am focusing on literary postmodernism, it also applies to other areas, such as the fine arts, film and music. Some of the key aspects of postmodern literature include experimentation (see, for example, my list of experimental authors and several of the other movements on the Movements page, such as Metafiction, Magic Realism and Oulipo), fragmentation, unreliable narrators, authorial intervention, the rejection of plot and meaning, playfulness, references to and use of pop culture, discontinuous narrative, fantasy, distortion of time, inclusion of historical or even living people as characters, often with roles different from their known activities, playing with time, massive conspiracy theories and paranoia, use of surrealism and multiple, often conflicting perspectives. There are numerous authors on this site that can be considered postmodernist. The following is a very incomplete sample of some postmodern authors.

Selected postmodern authors

Abish
Acker
Auster
Barth
Barthelme
Bolaño
Burroughs
Calvino
Carter
Coover
Cortázar
Coupland
Danielewski
Darrieussecq
DeLillo
Echenoz
Eco
Esterházy
Fowles
Gaddis
García Márquez
Gass
Gray
Hawkes
Ishiguro
Johnson
Kundera
Leyner
Manganelli
Markson
McElroy
Murakami
O’Brien
Pavic
Perec
Pynchon
Ríos
Rushdie
Scott
Vollmann
Wallace
Whitehead
Winterson

The Modern Novel

The world-wide literary novel from early 20th Century onwards

Post-modernism

Selected postmodern authors

Other links