Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater

Book excerpt: Postmodernist literature embraces a wide range of forms and perspectives, including texts that are primarily self-reflexive; texts that use pastiche, burlesque, parody, intertextuality, and hybrid forms to create textual realities that run either in opposition to or parallel with an external reality; fabulations that develop both of these strategies; texts that ironize their relationship to reality; works that more fully engage with political or cultural realities; and texts that deal with history as fiction. For example, a postmodernist novel or play might feature a writer struggling with writing, only to later discover that he is a character in a book by another writer struggling to write.