Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater

Postmodernist literature embraces a wide range of forms and perspectives, including texts that are primarily self-reflexive; texts that use pastiche, burlesque, parody, intertextuality, and hybrid forms to create textual realities that run either in opposition to or parallel with an external reality; fabulations that develop both of these strategies; texts that ironize their relationship to reality; works that more fully engage with political or cultural realities; and texts that deal with history as fiction. For example, a postmodernist novel or play might feature a writer struggling with writing, only to later discover that he is a character in a book by another writer struggling to write.

This Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater examines the different areas of postmodernist literature and theater and the variety of forms that have been produced. It contains a list of acronyms, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on individual writers, important aesthetic practices, significant texts, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. By placing these concerns within the historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts of postmodernism, this reference explores the frameworks within which postmodernist literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries operates.

About the Author:
Fran Mason is a British scholar who lectures at the University of Winchester