If postmodern literature captivates you, McHale's "Postmodernist Fiction" could be your next deep dive. It's a chance to explore how a wide array of international texts bend reality and question existence. You'll appreciate how eloquently McHale unpacks theoretical frameworks, making you reconsider the very nature of storytelling. Whether you're a literary scholar or just deeply fascinated by the mechanics of postmodern narratives, this study could reframe your understanding of contemporary literature.

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Like it or not, the term ‘postmodernism’ seems to have lodged itself in our critical and theoretical discourses. We have a postmodern architecture, a postmodern dance, perhaps even a postmodern philosophy and a postmodern condition. But do we have a postmodern fiction?In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Doležel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fictin’s ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself — or even about nothing at all — postmodernist fiction in McHale’s construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those handy literary perennials, Love and Death.

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