Abstract

Among the questions addressed by the study are: Should fiction console (popular fiction suggests that readers want consolation, yet few postmodernist writers seem to be offering it)? Is the postmodernist period qualitatively different from earlier periods? Is postmodernism decadent? In seeking evidence on these matters, Marguerite Alexander considers the work of a number of novelists including Faulkner, Beckett, Lowry, Durrell, Golding, Nabokov, Pynchon, Fowles, Lessing, Murdoch, Vonnegutand Doctorow.