From 1945 to the Present

Postmodernism is a movement which developed during the sencond part of the 20th century.
In this period the relation between literature and market became very strict: banks and many other associations sponsored literary prizes and in this way literature revitalized. The most important prize for fiction in Britain is the Booker Prize.
Not only literature was revitalized, but also poetry and theatre. During the 60s a new form of poetry, spoken poetry, spread and it was really praised by students and young people because it was considered the voice of their generation.
The theatre was really changed: it was characterized by multi-culturalism, which determined many mixed casts. This caused also the presence of many foreign languages in theatre.

After the Second World War literature dealt with the psychological effects of the war: every certain point was questioned and moral issues (good and evil) were analysed because of this terribile war and the Holocaust. Moreoover, there were also politic writers, like Orwell, who warned people about totalitarisms and communism.
During the 50s writers analysed philosophical themes and they were also interested into social matters as the inability to identify with new social values and the search of a personal identity.
Many Postmodernism writers referred to Modernism trends, so the interior monologue, the stream of consciousness and the multiplicity of the world and of people points of view are considered again.
But Postmodernism goes beyond Modernism: it accepts the fragmentation of the 20th century world, it does not want to find an element which unifies everything and all the old values and believes (religion, power, capitalism) are criticizes because they can't satisfy the new man.
Potmodernism also considers "high"art and "low" one united.
Postmodernism literature is characterized by three main trends: fantasy (imaginary worlds in novels are used to criticize the real one), magic realism (a development of fantasy trend where reality and imagination are united) and the reflexive novel (analysis of the structure of the novel and of its characters characterization).
In the 80s fiction was reborn with satire and crime fiction, which analysed murder psychology.
Present Postmodernism literature deals with contemporary themes (social matters as the relation between man and woman, the new position of women in the world, family problems and child abuse), but also focuses on historical themes (main 20th century events). Many other writers are interested into the analysis of the world of perversion and forbidden or in a search of the causes of nowadays crisis. An important feature of Postmodernism literature is intertextuality.
Postmodernism was also characterized by a female literature, which was not interested only in women's sensitivity, but to racialism, women position, sexuality.