Postmodernity in Latin America contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on recent developments in Latin American, and particularly Argentine, political and literary culture. While European and North American theorists of postmodernity generally view Latin American fiction without regard for its political and cultural context, Latin Americanists often either uncritically apply the concept of postmodernity to Latin American literature and society or reject it in an equally uncritical fashion. The result has been both a limited understanding of the literature and an impoverished notion of postmodernity. Santiago Colás challenges both of these approaches and corrects their consequent distortions by locating Argentine postmodernity in the cultural dynamics of resistance as it operates within and against local expressions of late capitalism. Focusing on literature, Colás uses Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch to characterize modernity for Latin America as a whole, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman to identify the transition to a more localized postmodernity, and Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration to exemplify the cultural coordinates of postmodernity in Argentina. Informed by the cycle of political transformation beginning with the Cuban Revolution, including its effects on Peronism, to the period of dictatorship, and finally to redemocratization, Colás’s examination of this literary progression leads to the reconstruction of three significant moments in the history of Argentina. His analysis provokes both a revised understanding of that history and the recognition that multiple meanings of postmodernity must be understood in ways that incorporate the complexity of regional differences. Offering a new voice in the debate over postmodernity, one that challenges that debate’s leading thinkers, Postmodernity in Latin America will be of particular interest to students of Latin American literature and to scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.

Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade, including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers, Late Postmodernism examines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in culture.

History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction investigates the ways postmodernist literary techniques have been adopted by Greek authors. Taking into consideration the global impetus of postmodernism, the book examines its local implications. Framed by a discussion of major postmodernist thinkers, the book argues for the ability of local cultures to retain their uniqueness in the face of globalization while at the same time adapting to the new global situation. The combination of external global influences and the specific internal concerns of Greek national literature makes the emergence of postmodernism in Greece distinctive from that of other national contexts. The book engages in larger theoretical debates about the "crisis" of national identity in the context of postmodern globalization and the resurgence of nationalist ideology either as a response to globalization or the exigencies of historical events. This crisis has been brought on in part by the very postmodernist and poststructuralist questioning of the ideologies upon which nation-states construct themselves. The central argument of the book is that postmodernist Greek writers question the idea of national identity based on both the impact of globalization and a reexamination of the discourses of national ideology: they suggest a turn away from the traditional concerns with cultural homogeneity towards an acceptance of multiplicity and diversity, which is reflected through experimentation with postmodernist literary techniques. Consequently, the unifying idea of this book is "national identity" as it is reconfigured in recent contemporary novels. My analysis incorporates the view that metafiction is a "borderline" or "marginal" discourse that exists on the boundary between fiction and criticism. The book illuminates the connections between the formal concerns of contemporary authors and the larger debates and philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism in general.

A lucid exploration of the key features of postmodernism and the most important authors from Beckett to DeLillo.

The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.

Containing more than fifty essays by major literary scholars, International Postmodernism divides into four main sections. The volume starts off with a section of eight introductory studies dealing with the subject from different points of view followed by a section that deals with postmodernism in other arts than literature, while a third section discusses renovations of narrative genres and other strategies and devices in postmodernist writing. The final and fourth section deals with the reception and processing of postmodernism in different parts of the world. Three important aspects add to the special character of International Postmodernism: The consistent distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism; equal attention to the making and diffusion of postmodernism and the workings of literature in general; and the focus on the text and the reader (i.e., the reader's knowledge, experience, interests, and competence) as crucial factors in text interpretation. This comprehensive study does not expressly focus on American postmodernism, although American interpretations of postmodernism are a major point of reference. The recognition that varying literary and cultural conditions in this world are bound to produce endless varieties of postmodernism made the editors, Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, opt for the title International Postmodernism.