"This collection of eleven essays with an introduction examines postmodernity, a contiguous literary movement from modernity in cross-culturalism. In the west, modernity, which flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century, is characterized by a synchronic and nonnarrative mode of thought and a manner of writing in opposition to mimetic realism. Whereas the text of modernity thrived on its rhythms, symbols, and representations of beauty, and above all on its impersonality, postmodernity in the late decades of the twentieth century sought relationships outside the text - those between literature and history, philosophy, psychology, society, and culture. The exploration of such relationships is literary to postmodernity as it is ancillary to modernity."--BOOK JACKET.