Ralph Clare published an essay, “The End of Postmodernism,” in American Literature in Transition: 1990-2000, edited by Stephen J. Burn and published by Cambridge University Press. The collection, containing essays written by many of the top scholars in the field, traces and examines the transformations in American literature and culture at the end of the millennium.
Clare’s essay addresses the supposed demise of literary postmodernism in the early 1990s by considering the still innovating later works of writers such as John Barth, William Gass, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gaddis and David Markson. The essay explores the way in which these writers respond to the “end of history,” postmodernism and the future of their own literary legacies.
