This anthology presents the synthesizing trend of Post-Modernism in all its diversity.

The Postmodern History Reader introduces students to the new points of controversy in the study of history and provides a framework by which to understand postmodernism and a guide to explore it further.

These readings are organized into four sections. The first explores the wellsprings of the debates in the relationship between the postmodern and the enterprise it both continues and contravenes: modernism. Here philosophers, social and political commentators, as well as cultural and literary analysts present controversial background essays on the complex history of postmodernism. The readings in the second section debate the possibility—or desirability—of trying to define the postmodern, given its cultural agenda of decentering, challenging, even undermining the guiding “master” narratives of Western culture. The readings in the third section explore postmodernism’s complicated complicity with these very narratives, while the fourth section moves from theory to practice in order to investigate, in a variety of fields, the common denominators of the postmodern condition in action.

These readings are organized into four sections. The first explores the wellsprings of the debates in the relationship between the postmodern and the enterprise it both continues and contravenes: modernism. Here philosophers, social and political commentators, as well as cultural and literary analysts present controversial background essays on the complex history of postmodernism. The readings in the second section debate the possibility--or desirability--of trying to define the postmodern, given its cultural agenda of decentering, challenging, even undermining the guiding "master" narratives of Western culture. The readings in the third section explore postmodernism's complicated complicity with these very narratives, while the fourth section moves from theory to practice in order to investigate, in a variety of fields, the common denominators of the postmodern condition in action.

The Postmodern Chronotope is an innovative interdisciplinary study of the contemporary. It will be of special interest to anyone interested in relations between postmodernism, geography and contemporary fiction. Some claim that postmodernism questions history and historical bases to culture; some say it is about loss of affect, loss of depth models, and superficiality; others claim it follows from the conditions of post-industrial society; and others cite commodification of place, Disneyfication, simulation and post-tourist spectacle as evidence that postmodernism is wedded to late capitalism. Whatever postmodernism is, or turns out to have been, it is bound up in rethinking and reworking space and time, and Paul Smethurst's intervention here is to introduce the postmodern chronotope as a term through which these spatial and temporal shifts might be apprehended. The postmodern chronotope constitutes a postmodern world-view and postmodern way of seeing. In a sense it is the natural successor to a modernist way of seeing defined through cubism, montage and relativity. The book is arranged as follows: - Part 1 is an interdisciplinary study casting a wide net across a range of cultural, social and scientific activity, from chaos theory to cinema, from architecture to performance art, from IT to tourism. - Part 2 offers original readings of a selection of postmodern novels, including Graham Swift's Waterland and Out of this World, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and First Light, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Marina Warner's Indigo, Caryl Phillips' Cambridge, and Don DeLillo's The Names and Ratner's Star.

Addresses the promises and perils of postmodernity for the church today.

The burgeoning use of modern literary theory and cultural criticism in recent biblical studies has led to stimulating--but often bewildering--new readings of the Bible. This book, argued from a perspective shaped by postmodernism, is at once an accessible guide to and an engagement with various methods, theories, and critical practices transforming biblical scholarship today. Written by a collective of cutting-edge scholars--with each page the work of multiple hands--The Postmodern Bible deliberately breaks with the individualist model of authorship that has traditionally dominated scholarship in the humanities and is itself an illustration of the postmodern transformation of biblical studies for which it argues. The book introduces, illustrates, and critiques seven prominent strategies of reading. Several of these interpretive strategies--rhetorical criticism, structuralism and narratology, reader-response criticism, and feminist criticism--have been instrumental in the transformation of biblical studies up to now. Many--feminist and womanist criticism, ideological criticism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalytic criticism--hold promise for the continued transformation of these studies in the future. Focusing on readings from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, this volume illuminates the current multidisciplinary debates emerging from postmodernism by exposing the still highly contested epistemological, political, and ethical positions in the field of biblical studies.