The book offers an insightful exploration of nine long poems by a diverse range of postmodernist poets, highlighting both well-known figures and lesser-known voices. It delves into the unique characteristics and themes of these works, providing a fresh perspective on canonical and marginalized poetry. Through this eclectic analysis, readers are invited to appreciate the complexity and richness of postmodern poetry.
Like it or not, the term ‘postmodernism’ seems to have lodged itself in our critical and theoretical discourses. We have a postmodern architecture, a postmodern dance, perhaps even a postmodern philosophy and a postmodern condition. But do we have a postmodern fiction? In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Doležel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fictin’s ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself — or even about nothing at all — postmodernist fiction in McHale’s construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those handy literary perennials, Love and Death.
