Post-Modernism is a cultural movement developed in the'60s as a reaction to Modernism.
While Modernism is still concerned with looking for a sense of life, Post-Modernism thinks that there isn't a unique truth or a truth at all.
In the Modern period man faces the crisis of the key concepts of Western culture, as religion and Capitalism, which has failed. As a consequence of it, man feels lost and tries to seek new certainties, starting a quest meant to find them. The quest is made in the formal research field.
Post-Modern artists do not even consider this quest, as they believe that there's nothing to find out, as no certain truth exists.
Therefore, nowadays technologies speed up Post-Modernism, as culture is more easy to access and the difference between high and low at disappear, while in Modernist culture this is not possible.
Furthermore, Post-Modernism rejects the Realism stylistic choices meant to give to the reader the idea that the writer is telling him the truth. The rejection of the Realistic attitude is linked to the Post-Modern concept that the writer does not own a complete knowledge of reality.
Also, as for Post-Modernism there is no linear sequence of events, the novel has no chronological order. This is linked to the relativity of time shown by Albert Einstein. The coexistence of different chronological times and the absence of a linear order of events can be find in Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours, where the writer shows that the only way to be realistic is to make time shifts in the narration. The timeline manipulation was firstly created by Laurence Stern in his Life and Opinions Of Tristam Shandy, which is the archetype of the absence of a chronological order. Time shifting was further developed in the Modernist literature with the stream of coscience.