Brian McHale and Len Platt (eds), The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature

Abstract

THE Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature is surely one of the least postmodern books that has ever been produced on the topic of postmodernism, and it is all the more original and useful as a result. The volume’s austere grey and black book jacket will be as familiar to readers of other instalments in the Cambridge Histories series as the scholarly rigour and historical precision to be found between the covers. The aim of this collection, in no uncertain terms, is to ‘historicize postmodernism’ (11). Brian McHale’s and Len Platt’s argument is that ‘histories of the postmodern [are] entirely viable’ (4) despite the fact that numerous theorists associated with postmodernism, such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, have ‘had issues with historiography’ (1). ‘Enough time has elapsed’, the editors declare in their General Introduction to the collection, ‘for us to be able to discern more of the internal articulation of the “postmodern era”—its successive moments or phases’ (4) and to examine ‘the relationship between [postmodern] cultural practice and the broader politics of the period’ (12).