John Fowles.ppt

John Robert Fowles
(March 31, 1926 – November 5, 2005)
John Robert Fowles
(March 31, 1926 – November 5, 2005)
Occupation
Novelist
Nationality
British
Notable work(s)
The Magus; The French Lieutenant's Woman
Many critics now consider his work on the cusp between modernism and postmodernism.
Early in the century the Roman Catholic church condemned a good many doctrines and practices, ancient and modern, under the capacious umbrella of “modernism,” and right away, as early as 1914, in spite of the appearance of nonsense in the term, theologians began speaking of “Postmodernism” by careless analogy with “Postimpressionism.”“Postmodern” has been applied to much contemporary writing, particularly with reference to the use of experimental forms. The fundamental philosophical assumptions of modernism, its tendency toward historical discontinuity, alienation, asocial individualism, solipsism, and existentialism continue to permeate contemporary writing, perhaps in a heightened sense. But the tendencies of the modernist to construct intricate forms, to interweave symbols elaborately, to create works of art that, however much they oppose some established present order, create within themselves an ordered universe, have given way since the 1960s to a denial of order, to the presentation of highly fragmented universes in the created world of art, and to critical theories that are forms of phenomenology. Myth has given way to the experiencing of aesthetic surfaces. Traditional forms, such as the novel, have given way to denials of those forms, such as the antinovel. The typical protagonist has e not a hero but an antihero. Writers such as Robbe-Grillet, Fowles, Pynchon, Barthelme, and Pinter are called postmodern in that they carry modernist assumtions about the world into the very realm of aart itself.
Postmodernist Period in English Literature, 1965---
Little changed during the 1960s in the national life of England; what had been characteristic in the 1950s continu