17 Facts About Postmodern literature

Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues.

Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s.

Precursors to postmodern literature include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but postmodern literature was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s.

Postmodern literature used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized.

Postmodern literature is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s.

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In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness" styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T S Eliot.

Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events.

Postmodern literature had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism.

Postmodern literature's works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres.

Postmodern literature was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters.

Postmodern literature is noted, along with Brion Gysin, for the creation of the "cut-up" technique, a technique in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message.

Some earliest examples of postmodern literature are from the 1950s: William Gaddis' The Recognitions, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

Since postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history.

Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style.

Postmodern literature employs a character in the novel named David Foster Wallace.

Strong examples of fabulation in contemporary Postmodern literature are found in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Postmodern literature has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back.