Characteristics of Postmodern Fiction

‘One might summarise some of the key characteristics of postmodern fiction as follows. Postmodern fiction often shows:

1. a preoccupation with the viability of systems of representation;
2. the decentring of the subject by discursive systems, and the inscription of multiple fictive selves;
3. narrative fragmentation and narrative reflexivity; narratives which double back on their own presuppositions;
4. an open-ended play with formal devices and narrative artifice, in which narrative self-consciously alludes to its own artifice, thus challenging some of the presuppositions of literary realism;
5. an interrogation of the ontological basis of and connections between narrative and subjectivity;
6. an abolition of the cultural divide beween high and popular forms of culture, embracing all in a mélange;
7. an exploration of ways in which narrative mediates and constructs history: e.g. Graham Swift’s preoccupation with the relationship between story and history in Waterland (1983);
8. the displacement of the real by simulacra, such that the original is always already linguistically constructed: novels incorporate ‘historical’ fictions as fact.’

– Tim Woods Beginning Postmodernism, 1999: 81-2

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