The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. The plot explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles' authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels.
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.
Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.
Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She is a literary scholar and theorist who has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture as well as on contemporary debates in literary and cultural theory.
George Paul Landow was Professor of English and Art History Emeritus at Brown University. He was a leading authority on Victorian literature, art, and culture, as well as a pioneer in criticism and theory of Electronic literature, hypertext and hypermedia. He also pioneered the use of hypertext and the web in higher education.
Nancy Katherine Hayles is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.
A vignette is a French loanword expressing a short and descriptive piece of writing that captures a brief period in time. Vignettes are more focused on vivid imagery and meaning rather than plot. Vignettes can be stand-alone, but they are more commonly part of a larger narrative, such as vignettes found in novels or collections of short stories.
Linda Hutcheon, FRSC, OC is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian studies. She is a University Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she has taught since 1988. In 2000 she was elected the 117th President of the Modern Language Association, the third Canadian to hold this position, and the first Canadian woman. She is particularly known for her influential theories of postmodernism.
Darwinian literary studies is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection, including gene-culture coevolution. It represents an emerging trend of neo-Darwinian thought in intellectual disciplines beyond those traditionally considered as evolutionary biology: evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, affective neuroscience, behavioural genetics, evolutionary epistemology, and other such disciplines.
Professor Patricia Waugh is a literary critic, intellectual historian and Professor of English Literature at Durham University. She is a leading specialist in modernist and post-modernist literature, feminist theory, intellectual history, and postwar fiction and its political contexts. Along with Linda Hutcheon, Waugh is notable as one of the first critics to work on metafiction and, in particular, for her influential 1984 study, Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.
Robyn R. Warhol is an American literary scholar, associated in particular with feminist narrative theory, of which she is considered one of the originators. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Warhol received her BA in English from Pomona College in 1977 and her PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1982, where she studied with Thomas Moser, George Dekker, and Ian Watt.
Richard Stang was an American literary critic, author, scholar, and professor whose groundbreaking insights on the 19th-century English novel have shaped the attitudes of subsequent writers and critics for more than six decades. He was the first critic to recognize and document the sophistication of contemporary mid-Victorian criticism of the novel, and to show that it in effect amounted to a holistic aesthetics of fiction for the English novel in the mid-century.
Danuta Fjellestad is a professor of American Literary studies at The English Department of Uppsala University, Sweden. She was appointed the professor's chair in 2007 and has since then been teaching and conducting research on postmodern and post-postmodern literature, with an interest in visuality studies as-well-as technologies in, and as a part of, literature. As an author, she is widely held in libraries worldwide.
The metaphysical detective story is a literary genre of experimental fiction in the 20th century and has a complicated relationship with traditional detective stories. This literary genre raises in-depth issues about the characteristics of reality, interpretation, the limitations of knowledge, subjectivity, and narrative. In the history of modernist and postmodernist fictions, the metaphysical detective story plays a significant role in shaping the detective literary tradition, the literature in the 20th century, the postmodernist discourse, and the pop culture. The beginning of the metaphysical detective story is regarded as the mystery works written by Edgar Poe. Later writers such as Umberto Eco, Georges Perec, and Paul Auster are also typical authors of this genre. Meanwhile, this particular detective fiction genre has been criticized literarily in diverse approaches, though it keeps self-evolving.
Efraim Sicher is an Israeli literary scholar. He obtained his PhD at Oxford University and taught at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev until his retirement in 2022. Among his investigations of narrative and memory, he has written on modern Jewish culture and Holocaust literature. He is the author of numerous books and article on the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. He edited the Penguin Classics edition of Babel's short story collection Red Cavalry. His work on postmodern Jewish writers includes the controversial Reenvisoning Jewish Identities: Reflections on Contemporary Culture in Israel and the Diaspora (2021) and Postmodern Love: Negotiating Jewish Identites and Spaces (2022), which challenged the consensus of separate cultures in Israel and America and pointed to the blurring of boundaries of gender, sexual, and ethnic identies in a breakdown of "Jewishness" and an erosion of history. Lederhendler, Eli. “Re-Envisioning Jewish Identities: Reflections on Contemporary Culture in Israel and the Diaspora by Efraim Sicher.” Partial Answers, vol. 21, no. 1, 2023, pp. 176–78, https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.0011.
Postmodern Metanarratives: Blade Runner and Literature in the Age of Image is a non-fiction book by Décio Torres Cruz published in 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Bruce Robbins is an American literary scholar, author and an academic. He is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Suzanne Keen is a literary scholar, feminist critic, a poet, author and academic administrator. She was W. M. Keck Foundation Presidential Chair and Professor of English at Scripps College, the women's college of the Claremont Colleges. Previously she served as Dean of the College at Washington and Lee University and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of Faculty, and Professor of Literature at Hamilton College. She became president of Scripps College on July 1, 2022. Dr. Keen announced her resignation from Scripps College effective March 20, 2023. Her resignation letter states she intends to return to teaching at Scripps after a sabbatical on the East Coast to be near elderly family members.
John Carlos Rowe is an American academic and author. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine as well as the USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
