postmodern fiction
Self-aware literary works
Postmodern fiction is literature that emerged in the mid-20th century, characterized by self-awareness, fragmented narratives, and skepticism toward grand explanatory frameworks.
The fiction often calls attention to its own artifice, blurs boundaries between high and low culture, and plays with unreliable narrators or multiple perspectives.
The novel's postmodern fiction elements included footnotes that contradicted the main text.
Writers like Pynchon, Borges, and DeLillo are frequently cited as exemplars.
- metafictionLiterature aware of itself
- breaking the fourth wallAcknowledging fictional boundaries
- magical realismFiction blending miraculous and mundane
- self-referentialityReferring to oneself
- infinite regressUnending causal chain
Thomas Pynchon · fragmentation · deconstruction · death of the author · Jorge Luis Borges · David Foster Wallace · irony · intertextuality · pastiche · hyperreality · blurred boundaries · unreliable narrator · Samuel Beckett · Kurt Vonnegut · relativism · poststructuralism · non-linear narrative · Vladimir Nabokov
postmodern fictionrealist fiction
Stories portraying plausible events
literary realism · naturalism · social realism · Victorian novel · traditional narrative
postmodern fictionlinear narrative
Story following chronological order
traditional storytelling · genre fiction · page-turner · beach read
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