The global explosion
the world was ready for change, and literature was central to the counterculture in the West of the 1950s and ’60s. Postmodernist writers and theorists focused on the artifice of writing, demanding more of the reader than simply engaging with a realist narrative. Novels now had fractured or nonlinear time spans, unreliable narrators, episodes of magical realism, and multiple-choice endings. During this period, the West, and in particular writing
in English, also loosened its grip on world culture. Postcolonial writing emerged in countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, and India, and authors such as Gabriel García Márquez helped raise the status of a group of South American writers of extraordinary creativity.
Modern literature now sings with the previously unheard voices of feminists, civil rights campaigners,
gay people, black and Native Americans, and immigrants.
There is a healthy meritocratic blurring of distinction between classic and popular fiction.
Global publishing, independent and internet publishing, global literature courses, national and international book prizes, and
the growing number of works published in translation are bringing Australian, Canadian, South African, Indian, Caribbean, and modern Chinese novels, among others, to a world audience. This vast library of global literature has become both a reminder of shared connections worldwide and a celebration of difference. ■
"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul" (Joyce Carol Oates)
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