Southern modernism, including later incarnations precipitously labeled postmodern, has been broadly characterized by two often contradictory streams: the pastoral, beginning with the plantation fiction of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, and the racial surreal, beginning with Charles Chesnutt’s sly ripostes in his conjure tales. Both respond to the region’s long history of racialized labor exploitation, running from the plantation through Walmart and FedEx, from Parchman through the nation’s current carceral system. As labor sociologists, the new historians of capitalism, and literary scholars such as Michael North have shown, these literary traditions and the history to which they respond do not constitute some quaint exception within ongoing American modernism and modernity but remain central to it, from the plantation house to the Westin Bonaventure and from Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Du Bois, Hurston, and Welty to William Styron, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown.

This chapter discusses the ways in which Rushdie and his work can be understood in the context of the aesthetics and ideologies of postmodernism. Rushdie’s novels deploy postmodern fictional devices, such as intertextuality and metafictional interruptions, to explore questions of politics, epistemology, and ontology. In his early work, Rushdie provides an instance of both the potential for postmodern techniques to craft original political perspectives commensurate with the aims of postcolonialism, and the limitations of a western theoretical perspective sceptical of those grand narratives of history and subjectivity over which postcolonial subjects were only now gaining purchase. His status as literary spokesperson for immigrant communities in Britain was revised after the Satanic Verses affair, and subsequent novels are sometimes found to lack the radical critique offered by the early work. This chapter argues that the development of Rushdie’s writing – particularly in recent volumes – shows evidence of a move away from the deconstructive application of postmodern strategies in particular postcolonial contexts to challenge political master-narratives, and towards a more general exploration of classical humanist themes such as love, good and evil, life and death. This chapter ends with illustrative readings of two recent Rushdie novels, The Golden House and Quichotte.

The Introduction begins with an attempt to understand the concept of nihilism itself. Six different aspects of the concept are identified and briefly explored. While nihilism is usually associated with twentieth-century schools, it is argued that in fact the true origins of modern nihilism can be found in the rapid development of the sciences in the Enlightenment. The scientific perspective revealed the seemingly insignificant role of humans in the universe and led to a struggle with nihilism, which became an important topic for many thinkers in the nineteenth century. Five theses are outlined: (1) the problem of modern nihilism arose in the wake of the scientific development of the Enlightenment; (2) nihilism was not a local issue confined only to a specific place or country, but instead was something central to the general Zeitgeist of the entire nineteenth century in Europe and the West; (3) nihilism was not a problem confined to philosophy, but it received detailed treatment in works of poetry, drama, and other forms of literature; (4) the problem of nihilism is more widespread than has been acknowledged; and (5) the discussions of nihilism in the nineteenth century anticipate the key topics of the existentialist movement.

If the domestic near future operates with residual and dominant cultural forms, in Raymond Williams’s terms, it also provides glimpses of potential emergent formations. This chapter reads two novels that give a particularly vivid sense of the incipient genre of near-future revolution struggling within inherited genres that can register but not properly embody it. While the eponymous company in The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013) provides a more legible delineation of the Anthropocene than the environmental disasters that often populate the domestic near future, its victory relies on a similar investment in individual embodiment, that has as its correlate a latent antipathy to collective agency – such as might coalesce in the prospective revolution glimpsed at the novel’s close. Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich (2013) progresses from a devastating satire of apocalyptic capitalism into an oscillation between shattered human communities and a dangerous journeying: between capitalist realism in the shadow of dystopia and the adventure romance. However, almost despite itself, the novel dowses at its end towards another kind of collective that would also be another form of novel.

While scholarship and cultural commentary following Wallace’s death was laudatory, straying at times into the hagiographic, at a distance of over ten years, different currents in his legacy are emerging. As might be expected with the developing field of research into any author of such high profile, a second wave of more critical work followed that first wave of scholarship, grappling with problems and failures in the Wallace oeuvre once the work of establishing the field was complete. This exciting period in the growth of Wallace Studies focused particularly around Wallace’s treatment of gender and positions of racial and gender privilege occupied by his writing. This turn, which has enriched and enlivened the scholarly dialogue, anticipated by some years the resurgence of a conversation regarding Wallace’s personal behavior in relationships with women, but Wallace’s public reputation has also been deeply affected by this conversation. Picking up some of the themes identified in earlier chapters relating specifically to the writing, this chapter traces the development of Wallace’s critical and cultural legacy with reference to this confluence of conversations, discussing the emerging public imagination of Wallace as well as the evolving critical dialogue around the strengths and weaknesses of his work.

Wallace’s ambivalent engagement with high postmodernism is by now axiomatic in criticism, but his relationship to more immediate literary influences is less well understood. This chapter traces Wallace’s network of twentieth-century intertextuality beyond the familiar territory of his troublesome inheritances of Barth, Pynchon and Updike, focusing particularly on his entanglement in the written cultures of the 1980s. Much of the critical work that situates Wallace as a postmodernist heir focuses on the formal innovation and experimentation in his writing; this chapter broadens out to consider geography, motif and theme as well as form and idiom. More particularly, the chapter places Wallace in the context of the “Brat Pack,” arguing that his writing, animated by a spirit of what Jill Eisenstadt called “excess and defiance,” owes as much to the literary group that came of age during the 1980s as to the postmodernist patriarchs more commonly discussed. Taking as a point of departure the early writing, especially The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair, in which many of these formative influences are more clearly visible than in the more mature work, this chapter considers the ways in which Wallace interacted with his own milieu and immediate forebears. Following the recent work of Thompson and Boswell in particular, the chapter also refers to Wallace’s own writing about his predecessors and peers, in which he often reflects, and indirectly reflects upon, the primary tendencies and themes of his own output; indeed, this chapter argues that the essays on other writers of the twentieth century are as revealing in respect of Wallace’s own writing as any of the overtly self-reflective/directive pieces. This chapter operates in conversation with the other chapters in this section, arguing that any attempt to interpret Wallace’s writing must be informed by an understanding of his complex critical, cultural and intertextual networks.

David Foster Wallace’s challenge as a writer was to try and square the circle of conjugating the legacy of (what was still vital about) postmodernism with the necessity to achieve truthfulness. What narratological shape does this post-ironist challenge take? Drawing on specific examples from his works, such as the jumbled chronology and the consistent employment of the present tense in “Little Expressionless Animals,” the utilization of what I call “figural sliding” in Infinite Jest, the double internal focalization in “Think,” the reorganization of deictic centers due to the metaleptic transgression in “Good Old Neon” and “PopQuiz #9,” this chapter shows how traditional narratological items were reinvented by Wallace to serve his thematic postindustrial concerns and to honor his ever-present need to connect with his readers. Unnatural narratology comes immediately to mind, and yet his pervasive attention to the reader invites us to employ an enactivist lens, thus focusing on the situated and embodied dimensions of the reading activity.

Wallace tends to put his readers in interpretive positions that baffle easy solutions: Narrators are simultaneously omniscient and limited, both “down here quivering in the mud of the trench” and Olympically coordinating “the whole campaign”; focalizing perspectives are fluid and overlapping; the distinction between story and discourse becomes permeable, and so forth. This contribution aims at mapping the (sometimes unnatural) trajectories of Wallace’s narratological reinterpretations while showing how readers negotiate (or fail to negotiate) textual clues starting from their experiential background and their embodied and situated positioning.

This chapter outlines the relationship between finance and postmodernism in the post-1970s United States. After laying out this shared narrative of finance and postmodernism, particularly in regard to the work of Fredric Jameson and in a reading of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the chapter then argues that the presumed whiteness of both finance capital and postmodern aesthetics in Jameson and Ellis is decentered by Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999). Bambara’s novel is set in Atlanta in 1979-1981, years during which the city was at once rapidly becoming a global financial capital and was simultaneously also the site of the abduction and murder of anywhere between thirty to one hundred Black children and youths. Bambara’s novel demands that this racialized violence be read as a part of any analysis of Atlanta as a financialized city, and shows us that there is no way of understanding finance and postmodernism without reckoning with the constitutive anti-Blackness of the US economy.

In terms of artifice, Telemann’s “musical idyll” Der May (ca. 1760), to a text by Karl Wilhelm Ramler, ranks far behind the composer’s other works from this time. Most aspects of the music are entirely regular, and they are embedded in harmonic progressions that hardly exceed simple cadential relations. In this sense, Der May reflects aesthetic discussions among German writers in the 1750s and 1760s about widely disseminated and translated poetry such as Salomon Gessner’s “Idyllen” of 1756. Among contemporary theorists, Johann Abraham Sulzer and Johann Christoph Gottsched describe the distance separating literary idylls and social reality as one of the genre’s constitutive features. Idylls can thus serve as a tool of self-assurance in an increasingly complex modernity where acceleration, secularization, and scientification lead to a widely experienced dichotomy between complexity and simplicity. In applying the concept of “othering” to analyze the multiple modernities of the 1760s, I ask whether Telemann’s Der May can be regarded as an alternative to the modernity of its time; that is, as a conceptually “postmodern” work.

When Marvel Studios released its superhero film Black Panther in 2018, kids across the continent of Africa began to salute one another Wakanda-style. They crossed their arms (in a gesture like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, who were laid to rest with their arms on their chests) and would end the greeting with the words ‘Wakanda forever’.

Wakanda, of course, is a fictional country. It was created, so the story goes, when a massive meteorite made up of an equally fictional metal, vibranium, crashed into a location somewhere in East Africa. Understanding the value of vibranium, the leaders of Wakanda concealed this rare and valuable energy-giving resource. Many of the best scholars of Wakanda were sent to study abroad and, on their return, their work turned Wakanda into one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries. Although Wakanda appears from the outside to be a poor, developing country, it is actually prosperous beyond belief.

“Postmodern Ecology in Don DeLillo’s Fiction” offers an ecocritical reading of DeLillo’s fiction through the lens of pastoralism, nature studies and apocalypse. Drawing from earlier discussion of ecology in DeLillo’s novel as well as from discussions of ecocrtiticism and place-based studies, this chapter focuses on several of DeLillo’s seminal works, White Noise, Underworld and Zero-K, along with his early short story “Creation” to demonstrate the presentation and evolution of environmental themes and messages throughout his oeuvre. By first looking at DeLillo’s inclusion and inversion of the tradition of pastoral in fiction and then moving towards a consideration of the trope of apocalypse, the chapter aims to prove how DeLillo makes an argument for place-based consciousness and environmental awareness and responsibility throughout his fiction.

Don DeLillo's work is frequently described as postmodern, even as his stated influences are modernists. This chapter discusses both terms in relation to DeLillo's work, toward an understanding that neither label necessarily brings readers towards a clearer understanding.

DeLillo has often been portrayed as a “reclusive author.” Even though this characterization of the man himself is not quite accurate, DeLillo’s work is rife with images of artists as solitary geniuses who eschew the spotlight. On a structural level, that image is manifested as well in how DeLillo himself rejects the postmodernist trend toward self-reflexivity and metafictional authorial intrusions. Instead, DeLillo’s work evinces the artistry of a distant but still controlling godlike author-figure, whom his characters can sense but not see.

Discussing DeLillo's relationship with postmodernism, with a focus on DeLillo's responses to critical and literary theory and the labels that critics have ascribed to his work.