Contemporary literature refers to works created in the latter half of the 20th century through the present day. But what defines this literary era and sets it apart? By analyzing prominent attributes, genres, authors, and seminal texts, we uncover the significance of contemporary storytelling and why it still captivates readers worldwide.
Characteristics: Fragmentation, Uncertainty, and Borderless Fiction
While no steadfast rules wholly encapsulate postmodern writing, literary critics highlight distinguishing qualities that set contemporary works apart from past periods. Fragmentation, unreliability, blurred boundaries, non-linear narratives, and self-conscious wordplay tend to broadly characterize contemporary voices.
As cultural theorist Frederic Jameson observed, fragmentation reflects the complex, fractured qualities of postmodern society. Novelists therefore abandon structured plots and single perspectives in favor of collage-like, polyvocal works with distorted sequence and reality. Take David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) – each fragmented chapter focuses on new protagonists and even genres across centuries and continents, exploring how lives subtly impact one another.
Subjectivity and multiplicity also define the postmodern experience of uncertainty. In literature, unreliable narrators thus abound. Classic examples include Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), with the questionable sanity of its central voice, and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000), layered with contradictory memoirs and pulp sci-fi passages.
Moreover, with today’s globalized culture eroding old boundaries, contemporary authors borrow styles and integrate real events into fictional worlds. Fusing fantasy and cold fact, magical realism flourished in Latin America through pioneers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez before becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Historical figures even play parts in postmodern sagas, evident in novels like José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991).
In addition to fragmentation, subjectivity and blurred boundaries, intertextuality permeates postmodern works. Through allusions, pastiche, parody and other self-referential techniques, contemporary writers foreground literature’s complex relationship with itself. Take Pulitzer winner Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) – this fictional saga of two Jewish comic book pioneers constantly references actual golden age comics while probing deeper Holocaust connections.
Metafiction similarly exposes the inner workings of fiction through self-conscious reflection on literature’s constraints. By directly addressing readers and highlighting artificiality of texts, metafictional writers like Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie and Jennifer Egan pull back the curtain to reveal the subjectivity of storytelling itself.
Finally, Thomas Pynchon epitomizes another postmodern quality – maximalism. In doorstoppers like Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006), his diffuse plots swollen with an overwhelming amount of characters, digressions and details frustrate readers, reflecting information age overload.
Prominent Genres: Sci-Fi, Historical Fiction, and Graphic Novels
While a vast array of genres fall under postmodernism’s sweeping umbrella, speculative fiction enjoys particular prominence. Within imaginative realms, contemporary authors can push boundaries and explore humankind’s existential plight.
Take Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) – the sci-fi genre provides fertile ground to probe technology’s capacity for good versus evil, or what defines “human”. Meanwhile, P.D. James’ Children of Men (1992) utilizes a dystopian future to spotlight society’s moral decline regarding fertility, hope, and violence.
Historical fiction also allows contemporary writers to reshape the past and comment subtly on modern issues. Fiction and nonfiction blend seamlessly in novels like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), which integrates real figures like Sigmund Freud into an untold American saga. Even more overtly, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) probes antebellum slavery’s scars through a female ex-slave haunted by her dead daughter.
According to the Association of American Publishers, U.S. graphic novel sales surged over 60% in 2022 to $2.66 billion, cementing dominance within publishing. Epitomized by Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991), his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about his father’s Holocaust experience depicted through cats, mice, pigs, and other animal disguises, this medium fuses visual and literary arts while navigating trauma. Furthermore, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000) utilizes stark black-and-white comic strips to illustrate the Iranian Revolution’s upheaval through one girl’s eyes.
Contemporary influence even permeates commercial genres, evident in Dan Brown’s symbology thrillers. His pop culture phenomenon The Da Vinci Code (2003) spawned heated debate by suggesting Jesus married Mary Magdalene and questioning Christianity’s foundations. Here we witness commercial fiction‘s potential for social impact in the postmodern age.
Influential Contemporary Writers: Exploration Through Innovation
While scope only allows a glimpse, prolific contemporary scribes like Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, and Don DeLillo dominate worldwide acclaim through pioneering narrative approaches.
Morrison frequently explores racial injustice, from life under slavery in Beloved to segregated America in Jazz (1992) down to modern cultural appropriation dilemmas in God Help the Child (2015). Breathtaking prose and nonlinear tales centered on singular female voices define her style. Indeed, in awarding Morrison the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, the committee cited her “visionary force and poetic import” in illuminating critical African-American experiences.
Alternatively, Murakami immerses readers in surreal worlds tinged by nostalgia, violence and detached urban loneliness. Norwegian Wood (1987), his bittersweet coming-of-age tale set amidst Japan’s 1969 student protests, propelled him into literary stardom with its lonely protagonist, graphic sexuality, and suicide themes. Signature eccentric touches like mysterious Sheep Man and Dancing Dwarfs permeate later works like Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (2009). Through the lens of magical realism, Murakami explores post-modern alienation and unknowability.
Margaret Atwood also utilizes speculative fiction to probe oppression of women, climate change, and genetic bioengineering. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) chillingly envisions America reengineered into misogynistic Gilead dictatorship, where fertile women become ritualized sex slaves. Decades later, the hit Hulu adaptation continues impacting cultural dialogues regarding reproductive rights. Though too forward-thinking in 1985, her vision only seems more precognizant through subsequent works like the eco-speculative MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) given today’s climate crisis.
Finally, Don DeLillo eruditely captures postmodern America through characters navigating 20th-century media saturation, conspiracy theories, and terror. White Noise (1985), his biting academic satire exploring family dysfunction and mortality, set the stage for later masterworks. Underworld (1997) backwards-traces modern anxieties to the 1951 home run that decided the National League pennant, while Falling Man (2007) grapples with 9/11’s psychic shockwave. More than documenting history, DeLillo probes collective consciousness.
Beyond these titans, contemporary fiction boasts diversity of visionaries, like:
Cormac McCarthy – His apocalyptic American West masterpiece Blood Meridian (1985) descends into stylized violence as a marauding gang wreaks havoc along the Texas-Mexico border. Stark prose and morally opaque antiheroes define McCarthy‘s biblical yet grim postmodern aesthetic.
Kazuo Ishiguro – This British author of Japanese descent excels at first-person narration exploring unreliable memory and repressed emotion. The Remains of the Day (1989) spotlights an English butler’s misguided sense of duty and denial of wartime responsibility via understated, elegant prose.
Caryl Phillips – The diasporic novel Crossing the River (1993) revolves around African diaspora identity with fractured chronology, demonstrating Phillips’ recurring postmodern themes of exile, belonging and fluid consciousness.
Ann Patchett – Blending family drama and magical realism, Bel Canto (2001) fictionalizes the 1996 Peruvian embassy hostage crisis, spotlighting unlikely bonds formed between hostage takers and captives in a brutal standoff.
Michael Chabon – Genre-bending installations like detective fiction in The Yiddish Policemen‘s Union (2007) and superhero comics within The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) exemplify Chabon’s playful yet introspective postmodern fusion of high and low culture.
Hilary Mantel – She reimagines Tudor England through Thomas Cromwell’s eyes in her acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy (2009-2020), blending meticulous historical research with psychologically intimate contemporary literary storytelling to humanize the notorious statesman behind Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s doomed romance.
Marlon James – This Jamaican writer garnered the prestigious Man Booker Prize for his maximalist crime saga A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which weaves an intricate web across decades and continents surrounding Bob Marley’s 1976 assassination attempt. Voices spanning CIA agents to street thugs showcase stunning versatility.
Zadie Smith – Race, immigrant identity and cultural clash permeate inventive novels like campus satire White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012), her experimental ode to Northwest London blending streams of consciousness with text speak and Scrabble-tile narrative devices in quintessential postmodern fashion.
This diverse cohort demonstrates contemporary fiction’s breadth – from Cormac McCarthy’s highbrow, lyrical savagery to Hilary Mantel’s critically-acclaimed historical revisions to Marlon James’ gritty vernacular explosions, postmodern literature contains multitudes.
Why Contemporary Literature Matters
Some critics blast postmodern writing as overly fragmented, despairing, pretentious and passionless. Yet one cannot deny contemporary literature’s cultural significance for both mirroring and shaping societal attitudes over tumultuous decades.
Through disjointed texts and unreliable narrators, postmodernists reflect feelings of uncertainty cast by WWII atrocities, the turbulent 60s, Vietnam, Watergate scandals. Writers like Kurt Vonnegut utilized emerging postmodern techniques not just for style’s sake but to process humanity’s capacity for evil, as demonstrated in absurdist anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
Furthermore, by breaching boundaries between fantasy and reality, high and low art, popular and Western canons, contemporary literature fosters inclusiveness. Take magical realism – although pioneered by Latin Americans like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the genre’s incorporation into worldwide postmodern literature helps dilute hegemony of Western literary traditions.
Moreover, increased representation through boundary-pushing writers like Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood spotlights marginalized voices. When formerly taboo realms enter literary discourse, whether 60s race riots or The Handmaid’s Tale’s allusions to misogyny, more pluralistic cultural dialogues unfold.
Indeed, the power of postmodern storytelling continually seeps beyond pages into film, art, politics and everyday mindsets. Whether you devour Kurt Vonnegut or graphic memoirs or find postmodern styles too discordant, pivotal contemporary works undoubtedly shape 21st-century thought.
So delve in with an open mind to witness innovation in action. New portals to life’s essential questions always await beyond the first uncertain sentence.