Re : reading the postmodern : Canadian literature and criticism after modernism

This title explores the development of the idea of the postmodern and debates about its meaning and its applicability to various genres of Canadian writing, and charting its decline in recent years as a favoured critical trope.;Introduction: post-, marked Canada / Robert David Stacey -- Retrospections. Boundary 2 and the Canadian postmodern / Robert Kroetsch ; Canadian postmodernisms: misreadings and non-readings / Frank Davey ; The glories of hindsight: what we know now / Linda Hutcheon -- En garde! Traditions, counter-traditions, anti-traditions. Postmodern postmortem: irony and literary history in Linda Hutcheon's poetics / Adam Carter ; Getting ready to have been postmodern / Christian Bök ; Feeling ugly: Daniel Jones, Lynn Crosbie, and Canadian postmodernism's second wave / Stephen Cain ; Reconciling regionalism: spatial epistemology, Robert Kroetsch, and the roots of Canadian postmodern fiction / Alexander MacLeod ; Postmodern decadence in Canadian sound and visual poetry / Gregory Betts -- Historicities. Attack of the "Latté-drinking relativists": postmodernism, historiography, and historical fiction / Herb Wyile ; "The postmodern impasse" and Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's boy / Jennifer Blair ; Postmodern realism and photographic subjectivity in The stone diaries / Deborah C. Bowen ; Re-performing microhistories: postmodern metatheatricality in Canadian millennial drama / Jenn Stephenson ; F the ineffable! The allegorical intention in ghostmodernism / Sylvia Sd̲erlind -- Publics. Bowering, postmodernism, and Canadian nationalism: a short sad book / Jason Wiens ; Re: reading the postmodern-"mess is lore" / Pauline Butling ; Why postmodernism now? Toward a poetry of enactment / Susan Rudy. It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century—even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country's non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, plural, and open-ended pursuit of truth as a multiple possibility as outlined by Jean-François Lyotard. In fact, long before Lyotard published his influential work The Postmodern Condition in 1979, Canadian writers and critics were employing the term to describe a new kind of writing. RE: Reading the Postmodern marks a first cautious step toward a history of Canadian postmodernism, exploring the development of the idea of the postmodern and debates about its meaning and its applicability to various genres of Canadian writing, and charting its decline in recent years as a favoured critical trope.