Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0631210288 ISBN 13: 9780631210283

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000

Synopsis

Literature today is a very different concept from that of only a generation ago, and this difference is attributed usually to 'postmodernism'. Most radical of all is the possibility that the very notion of literature is rendered untenable by postmodernism. How did this possibility arise? Who are the key figures responsible for its emergence; which are the key texts of its expression? This Anthology provides ways of responding to such questions.

About this title

About the Author

Niall Lucy is Head of the School of Arts at Murdoch University. He is the author of Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishers 1997) and Debating Derrida (1995).

From the Back Cover

Literature today is a very different concept from that of only a generation ago, and this difference is attributed usually to 'postmodernism' as a powerful signifier of the radically new and challenging. Most radical of all is the possibility that the very notion of literature is rendered untenable by postmodernism. How did this possibility arise? Who are the key figures responsible for its emergence; which are the key texts of its expression?

This Anthology provides ways of responding to such questions and at the same time to show that postmodern literary theory cannot be understood in terms of an archive or a method. Its defining feature is an attitude of questioning, which neither derives from a manifesto nor constitutes a movement.

Postmodern literary theory hasn't come from nowhere. Its beginnings lie in certain ideas associated with the likes of Barthes and Foucault in the 1970s, and in the disavowal of values and the questioning of literature associated with the eighteenth-century Romantics. Although postmodern literary theory does have some foundational texts and founding figures, these work to undo the very notion of 'foundations' - including the very notion of literature itself. It is this work (rather than some archive) which Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology is designed to show. What is anthologized here, in short, are concepts, arguments, practices and debates.

Students will be guided to read each chapter as a particular response to a specific problem or concept relating to the overall theme: that postmodernism is concerned with only one thing - the question of literature.

This Anthology provides ways of responding to such questions and at the same time to show that postmodern literary theory cannot be understood in terms of an archive or a method. Its defining feature is an attitude of questioning, which neither derives from a manifesto nor constitutes a movement.

Postmodern literary theory hasn't come from nowhere. Its beginnings lie in certain ideas associated with the likes of Barthes and Foucault in the 1970s, and in the disavowal of values and the questioning of literature associated with the eighteenth-century Romantics. Although postmodern literary theory does have some foundational texts and founding figures, these work to undo the very notion of 'foundations' - including the very notion of literature itself. It is this work (rather than some archive) which Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology is designed to show. What is anthologized here, in short, are concepts, arguments, practices and debates.

Students will be guided to read each chapter as a particular response to a specific problem or concept relating to the overall theme: that postmodernism is concerned with only one thing - the question of literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0631210288
• ISBN 13: 9780631210283
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 472
• Editor: Lucy Niall