Some well known postmodern novels in chronological order:
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Magic realism or magical realism is a style or genre of fiction and art that presents a realistic view of the world while incorporating magical elements, often blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Magic realism often refers to literature in particular, with magical or supernatural phenomena presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting, commonly found in novels and dramatic performances. Despite including certain magic elements, it is generally considered to be a different genre from fantasy because magical realism uses a substantial amount of realistic detail and employs magical elements to make a point about reality, while fantasy stories are often separated from reality. Magical realism is often seen as an amalgamation of real and magical elements that produces a more inclusive writing form than either literary realism or fantasy.
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
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.
Historiographic metafiction is a term coined by Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in the late 1980s. It incorporates three domains: fiction, history, and theory.
Kafka on the Shore is a 2002 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Its 2005 English translation was among "The 10 Best Books of 2005" from The New York Times and received the World Fantasy Award for 2006. The book tells the stories of the young Kafka Tamura, a bookish 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Oedipal curse, and Satoru Nakata, an old, disabled man with the uncanny ability to talk to cats. The book incorporates themes of music as a communicative conduit, metaphysics, dreams, fate, and the subconscious.
Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock and Zeroville, he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.
A Wild Sheep Chase is the third novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. First published in Japan in 1982, it was translated into English in 1989. It is an independent sequel to Pinball, 1973, and the third book in the so-called "Trilogy of the Rat". It won the 1982 Noma Literary Newcomer's Prize.
Experimental literature is a genre of literature that is generally "difficult to define with any sort of precision." It experiments with the conventions of literature, including boundaries of genres and styles; for example, it can be written in the form of prose narratives or poetry, but the text may be set on the page in differing configurations than that of normal prose paragraphs or in the classical stanza form of verse. It may also incorporate art or photography. Furthermore, while experimental literature was traditionally handwritten, the digital age has seen an exponential use of writing experimental works with word processors.
Paranoid fiction is a term sometimes used to describe works of literature that explore the subjective nature of reality and how it can be manipulated by forces in power. These forces can be external, such as a totalitarian government, or they can be internal, such as a character's mental illness or refusal to accept the harshness of the world they are in.
Autofiction is, in literary criticism, a form of fictionalized autobiography.
The bibliography of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon includes both fiction and nonfiction works.
The encyclopedic novel is a literary concept popularised by Edward Mendelson in two 1976 essays referring to a work of fiction with an exhaustive, encyclopedia-like scope and writing style. In Mendelson's formulation, encyclopedic novels "attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge". In more general terms, the encyclopedic novel is a long, complex work of fiction that incorporates extensive information, often from specialized disciplines of science and the humanities. Mendelson's essays examine the encyclopedic tendency in the history of literature, considering the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Faust, Moby-Dick, and War and Peace, with an emphasis on the modern Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. Commonly cited examples of encyclopedic novels in the postmodern period include, in addition to Pynchon, Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations (1991), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). Other literary critics have explored the concept since, attempting to understand the function and effect of "encyclopedic" narratives, and coining the related terms systems novel and maximalist novel.
Joseph Tabbi (1960-) is a US academic living in Norway, and is a full professor at the University of Bergen. He is a literary scholar and theorist, notable for his contributions to the fields of American literature and electronic literature.
The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema is a short story by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, written in 1982. The title references "The Girl from Ipanema", the famous Bossa nova song that was first released in March 1964 in the album Getz/Gilberto. The story follows the musings of an unnamed narrator as he contemplates the song, detailing one memory to the next. It culminates in his meeting with the metaphysical girl from the song, and his expression of longing for a union with her.
Petrofiction or oil fiction, is a genre of fiction focused on the role of petroleum in society.
Somehow, Crystal is a Japanese novel by Yasuo Tanaka. Published in magazine form as the winner of the 17th Bungei Prize in 1980, it was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, and published in book form by Kawade Shobō Shinsha in 1981. A bestseller shortly after publication, the novel was controversial among contemporary critics for its apparent glorification of luxury consumption and its use of extensive annotations to identify desirable real-world products, brands, services, and locations encountered by the book's fictional characters. Academic critics have since identified Somehow, Crystal as an early and important example of Japanese postmodern literature. The book has been translated into Korean, German, and English, and a Japanese film adaptation was released by Shochiku in 1981.
Brian Stonehill was an American media studies scholar. He was a professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he founded the college's media studies department. He was the author of the book The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon.
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