postmodern literature
Self-aware experimental fiction
Postmodern literature is fiction and poetry from the mid-20th century onward that rejects traditional narrative conventions.
It embraces fragmentation, unreliable narrators, metafiction, and playful self-awareness about being a text.
Authors like Pynchon, DeLillo, and Borges blur boundaries between high and low culture, mix genres, and question whether objective truth or stable meaning exists.
The novel's postmodern literature techniques—footnotes within footnotes, characters aware they're fictional—divided critics.
- metafictionLiterature aware of itself
- simulacraInsubstantial likenesses or copies
- late capitalismMature market-dominated era
- intertextualityConnections between written works
- pasticheImitative artistic tribute
unreliable narrator · death of the author · hyperreality · irony · poststructuralism · hypertext · deconstruction · Thomas Pynchon · bricolage · fragmentation · Margaret Atwood · Jorge Luis Borges · absurdism · Cold War era · white noise · self-referential · semiotics · grand narrative
postmodern literatureliterary realism
Accurate portrayal of everyday life
Victorian literature · naturalism · modernist literature · classical literature · social realism
modern, literature, literary, literate, literacy, illiterate, literati, postmodern, postmodernism