Punter, David
Dr. David Punter is Professor of English and Graduate Dean of Arts at the University of Bristol. He was educated at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and has since held posts at the University of East Anglia; Fudan University, Shanghai, China; the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and the University of Stirling. Dr. Punter has published some 20 books of literary criticism as well as four volumes of poetry and hundreds of essays and articles on Gothic, romantic and contemporary literature, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
2005 0-7734-6183-3This is a book that treats postmodernism in its own terms, regarding it as a phenomenon which both represents a contemporary moment and also looks towards its own transcendence, passing away, disappearance. It is distinctive in two ways. First, it not only deals with recognizably postmodern features and aspects – the death of the author, dislocations of time and space, experimentations with different media – but it also looks forward to modes of writing and textuality which have – perhaps already – displaced the postmodern – the graphic novel, electronic textuality, the virtually real. Second, it attempts a type of discourse that matches these developments: never completely discursive or linear, this book seeks for a new type of criticism which will both reflect the spectrality towards which much postmodernism tends and at the same time remain in touch with the need to encounter postmodern and post-postmodern texts and cultural phenomena in intelligible terms. The book’s critical range extends from the Gothic through to the most recent harbingers of modernity, and it describes a trajectory that will both take account of a significant mass of recent fiction and poetry and at the same time point readers towards the most likely developments in the textualities of the twenty-first century.
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