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.

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Robert David Stacey is assistant professor of Canadian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

"It is difficult for me to overstate the value of this book...[it] is a must-read for anyone attempting to understand Canadian literature since the 1960s...RE: Reading the Postmodern is an excellent resource for commprehending where Canadian literature has been in the past half-century, where CanLit is now, and where CanLit is going."
- Canadian Literature