The Intellectual Context

For all its declared interest in entertaining, postmodern fiction has not always been the seductive, fun-filled place to visit anticipated by the enthusiastic Robert Scholes in his now classical study, The Fabulators (1967), written in the then early days of postmodern experimentation. In his programmatic essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, published in the same year of 1967, John Barth argued it was not so much that the contemporary writer had run out of plots, rather, humbled by the monumental scale of Joyce's achievement, whatever creativity remained available for the contemporary novelist was impeded by the demand of being “technically up-to-date”. However, decades of novelistic theory and practice have since shown that linguistic bravura and

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Citation: Neagu, Adriana-Cecilia. "New York Trilogy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 August 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3273, accessed 25 November 2024.]