This is another handy-sized volume in the Cambridge Companions series with a chronology of relevant events from 1960. However, this only reaches 2014, so misses out on the election of Donald Trump to the White House, which is living history at the moment but an omission for future scholars unless there is an updated volume soon.
It is important for a book with a title such as this to define terms, and Paula Geyh does this in the introduction, not only defining postmodernity but also stating the book’s perspective that “we are still somewhere in its midst” (p. 2), despite this being in dispute among some academics, e.g. when might be the end of postmodernity and the start of some new label.
The contributors take the reader through the historical angle, the current understanding of the nature of postmodern writing in America and then different broader perspectives such as the nature of history and fiction, postmodern constructions on gender and sexuality and cultural effects of ethnic American literature, women’s writing and so on. Text and image are discussed, as well as, in the final chapter, the new platforms and narratives enabled by “electronic fictions”.
The index appears thorough, but it might have been helpful to have a separate checklist of authors discussed in the volume, for those who are less well acquainted with the subject.
This is a scholarly text for students of American literature but is unlikely to be of wide interest to general readers. An irritation for this reviewer was that while the design, layout and paper quality were good, the pages were coming loose in the binding of the paperback copy received, which is uncharacteristic of this publisher and, hopefully, a one-off.
