The poet John Donne once wrote that "no man is an island," and for postmodernists, no text is an island. Postmodernism is all about the connections between texts, including the various ways in whic...

Here's a term that gets tossed around quite a bit.First used by William H. Gass in a 1970 essay, "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction," the word "metafiction" signals the kind of text that emphasize...

Think of pastiche as the literary equivalent of a collage: it's not about creating something from scratch but drawing on what already exists. (Yeah, those Bachelor contestants know what's up.) Ther...

Where minimalism is all about making things neat, tidy, and low key, maximalism goes against the grain by embracing excess. And for many postmodernists, maximalism is where it's at.Because postmode...

Irony isn't exclusive to postmodernism, but the pomos just own it. Before we dive in, take a look at Shmoop's definition of irony, paying closest attention to verbal irony. It's kind of like sarcas...

While some authors and theorists welcomed postmodernism with open arms, others have argued that it's not all fun and games. Guy Debord wrote an influential book called The Society of Spectacle (196...

For all its playfulness, postmodern literature also deals with heavy stuff—including paranoia. Yep, these people thought someone was out to get them.Okay, we need to take social and historical ba...

Let's hop in our Shmoop time machines and head back to the 18th century: a little period we like to call the Enlightenment. Enlightenment folks were all about order, rationality, science, reason, a...

As you might imagine, postmodernism isn't big on boundaries and limits—which means there's not really a set date we can point to and say, "That's it! That's exactly when postmodernism began!" (Bu...

Let's sum up an entire economic and political way of living in one sentence: capitalism describes an industrial society in which consumerism and private ownership are the order of the day and compe...