Postmodern & Contemporary Literature2 Marks Questions with Answers · Authors & Works · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

The Theatre of the Absurd — the term coined by the critic Martin Esslin (1961) — is post-war drama that stages the meaninglessness of existence described in Camus's Myth of Sisyphus: circular plots, broken language, tramps and waiting. Its masters are Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Adamov, with Pinter as its chief English heir.

Beckett's tragicomedy — written in French as En attendant Godot (premiered Paris, 1953), translated by Beckett himself into English (London, 1955) — in which the tramps Vladimir and Estragon wait, through two almost identical acts, for a Godot who never comes. The critic Vivian Mercier famously described it as a play in which 'nothing happens, twice'. Beckett won the Nobel Prize in 1969.

The label the press attached to the irreverent lower-middle-class writers of the 1950s after John Osborne's Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court in 1956 — its hero Jimmy Porter became the type of the educated, classless malcontent. The group includes Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954), Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), John Braine (Room at the Top) and John Wain.

The Movement was the 1950s reaction in poetry against both Modernist obscurity and Dylan Thomas's romantic rhetoric: rational, formal, ironic verse of ordinary life. Its members — Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, D. J. Enright — were canonised in Robert Conquest's anthology New Lines (1956).

Larkin, the librarian of Hull, perfected the Movement manner in three slim volumes — The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) — turning deflated, sceptical Englishness into permanent poetry ('Books are a load of crap'; 'What will survive of us is love'). He refused the Laureateship in 1984; Ted Hughes took it.

The comedy of menace — the phrase, borrowed by the critic Irving Wardle, attached itself to Harold Pinter's early plays The Birthday Party (1958) and The Caretaker (1960) — domestic small talk under which an unexplained threat gathers, articulated as much by the famous 'Pinter pause' as by words. Pinter received the Nobel Prize in 2005, and 'Pinteresque' entered the dictionary.

William Golding's first novel (1954): English schoolboys wrecked on an island descend from order into savagery, inverting the optimism of Ballantyne's The Coral Island. A fable of original sin — Piggy's glasses, the conch, the pig's head ('the Lord of the Flies' = Beelzebub) are exam-favourite symbols. Golding won the Booker for Rites of Passage (1980) and the Nobel Prize in 1983.

Postcolonial literature is writing from and about the former colonies that answers imperial narratives — 'the Empire writes back to the Centre', Rushdie's phrase, which Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin took for their foundational study The Empire Writes Back (1989). Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) — Saleem Sinai, born at the exact midnight of Indian independence — won the Booker Prize and later, twice, the 'Booker of Bookers'.

Magic realism narrates the impossible in the calm tone of fact, fusing myth and history — the manner of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, naturalised into English fiction by Rushdie (telepathic children of midnight) and Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus). It is postcolonial fiction's favourite instrument for retelling official history.

Metafiction is fiction that exposes its own fictionality — the novel commenting on the writing of the novel. The English showcase is John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), whose narrator intrudes from the twentieth century and offers alternative endings. Other staples: Tristram Shandy as ancestor, and the term itself from William H. Gass.

Hughes answered the Movement's tameness with elemental animal poems — The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Lupercal, and the dark trickster sequence Crow (1970). Poet Laureate from 1984, he broke thirty-five years of silence about his first wife Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters (1998), published months before his death.

Heaney made the Irish farm and the Troubles into the central English-language poetry of the late century, from Death of a Naturalist (1966 — 'Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; I'll dig with it') through the bog-body poems of North (1975). He won the Nobel Prize in 1995, and his Beowulf translation (1999) became a bestseller.

The campus novel is comic fiction set in a university, inaugurated by Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) and perfected by David Lodge (Changing Places, 1975; Small World, 1984) and Malcolm Bradbury (The History Man, 1975). Lodge's Rummidge–Euphoria exchanges double as satire on literary theory itself — making the genre a favourite NET crossover topic.

Orwell opened the period with its two defining fables: Animal Farm (1945), the beast-fable of revolution betrayed ('All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others'), and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), whose Big Brother, Newspeak, doublethink and Room 101 supplied the permanent vocabulary of totalitarianism. He died in January 1950, at the threshold of the age he named.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) by Tom Stoppard retells Hamlet from the perspective of its two bewildered minor characters, who stumble through events they cannot understand, caught in a play whose script they do not know. Like Godot's tramps they wait, philosophise and fail to act; their fate is announced when they learn they are to die in England. It combines Theatre of the Absurd with metatheatre and launched Stoppard as the post-war period's most verbally brilliant playwright.

Joe Orton's farces — Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), Loot (1965) and What the Butler Saw (1969, produced posthumously) — brought black comedy and anarchic sexuality into the tradition of Wilde and Feydeau, attacking bourgeois propriety and the police with gleeful bad taste. Orton was murdered by his partner Kenneth Halliwell in 1967 at the age of thirty-four. His work is the dark comic twin of the Angry Young Men's social realism.

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) is narrated in Nadsat, a private argot mixing Russian and Cockney slang that gives the ultra-violence of its anti-hero Alex a sinister aesthetic distance. Its central question — whether a criminal forcibly conditioned to feel sick at violence has been robbed of his humanity and thus his moral worth — is the age's sharpest fictional debate on free will versus social control. Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, which Burgess disowned, made it globally notorious.

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962) is the foundational feminist novel of the post-war period: Anna Wulf's four notebooks — black (Africa, politics), red (Communist Party), yellow (fiction), blue (diary) — and the golden notebook that contains them mirror the fragmented consciousness of a politically committed woman trying to hold her life together. Lessing won the Nobel Prize in 2007 at the age of eighty-seven.

V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018), born in Trinidad of Indian descent, explored postcolonial displacement and the failure of post-independence societies with unflinching irony: A House for Mr Biswas (1961), The Mimic Men (1967) and A Bend in the River (1979). He won the Nobel Prize in 2001. His critically sceptical view of postcolonial nationalism and his essays on Islamic societies made him one of the most controversial and debated writers in the postcolonial field.

Kitchen Sink drama is a strand of British social-realist theatre and film of the late 1950s and 1960s depicting working-class life in its unglamorous domestic reality — the kitchen sink as the shorthand for the mundane. Its key plays include Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958), Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup with Barley (1958) and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), which is its acknowledged starting point. It is the theatrical counterpart of the Angry Young Men novel.

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979) rewrote classic fairy tales — Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood — from a feminist perspective, exposing their encoded violence and sexuality. Her novel Nights at the Circus (1984) brought the magic-realist aerialiste Fevvers, with wings, into Edwardian London. Carter is the central feminist-postmodern novelist in the British tradition and a primary influence on contemporary women's writing.

Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan is a metafictional novel about the way storytelling can enable and corrupt moral judgment: the young Briony's false accusation of Robbie Turner in 1935 is a failure of imagination, and the novel's final revelation — that its consoling happy ending is Briony's own fiction, written as atonement — makes the reader complicit in the literary lie. It is McEwan's most celebrated work and a standard text in postmodern fiction courses.

Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) is narrated with characteristic cold wit that moves freely in time — we learn from early pages how the story ends — around the charismatic Edinburgh teacher who shapes her chosen girls and is eventually betrayed by one of them. Its formal irony, with an omniscient narrator who discloses futures casually, and Spark's Catholic worldview make it the most formally innovative British novel of the early 1960s.

The Remains of the Day (1989) is narrated by Stevens, an English butler whose lifelong devotion to professional dignity turns out to have masked complicity with a pro-appeasement employer and the suppression of his own emotional life. Its quietly devastating unreliable narrator and its meditation on English deference, class and the fading of empire won it the Booker Prize in 1989. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in 2017.

Sylvia Plath's Ariel (1965, published posthumously) transformed confessional American poetry — Lady Lazarus, Daddy, Tulips — into something of an entirely new intensity, turning personal suffering into mythic and political statement. The Bell Jar (1963) is her semi-autobiographical novel about mental illness and 1950s American conformity. She married Ted Hughes in 1956 and died in 1963; the mythology of her life has not overshadowed the magnitude of her poems.

Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe narrates the colonisation of Igbo society in eastern Nigeria through the tragedy of Okonkwo, using the Igbo world's own internal logic — proverbs, clan customs, the Oracle — rather than an external anthropological gaze. It is the founding text of African literature in English and the deliberate counter-narrative to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, whose primitivist vision of Africa Achebe attacked in his essay An Image of Africa (1977). It has sold over twenty million copies.

Carol Ann Duffy became the first female Poet Laureate in 2009. Her collection The World's Wife (1999) gave voice to the silenced women of myth and history — Medusa, Eurydice, Mrs Midas — through dramatic monologue, her signature form. Mean Time (1993) won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Her accessible, witty, politically sharp style makes her the most widely taught contemporary British poet in schools and universities.

The Booker Prize (founded 1969 as the Booker McConnell Prize) is awarded annually to the best original novel written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It has been the single most powerful prize shaping the postmodern canon: Golding (1980), Rushdie (1981), Ishiguro (1989) and Coetzee (1983, 1999) all won it before or alongside their Nobel Prizes. The 1993 Booker of Bookers — won by Midnight's Children — and the 2014 extension to American authors made it effectively the prize of the English-language novel.