Post-modernism with its self-contradictory implications, its self-conscious deployment of trickery playfulness and unexplained supernaturalism, its questioning of universal truths and its penchant for apocalyptic content and subversive strategies seems too heady a brew for readers to enjoy.
The present volume isolates the key concepts of post-modernism through illustrations from the works of John Fowles, Thomas Pynchon, William Golding, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Iris Murdoch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende. These concepts are then placed in a theoretical framework with reference to critics and thinkers ranging from Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Terry Eagleton to the structuralism and the post-structuralists.
In addition, the volume incorporates incisive articles from this critical perspective analysing the novels of writers ranging from Iris Murdoch, Mark Twain, Graham Greene, Ken Kasey, Salman Rushdie and Mahasweta Devi to Rukun Advani.