Literature of the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Saxon period Beowulf

There are some other important features of postmodernist literature :
1) As there are open ends in postmodernist books, (the reader is likely to ask "And what of it?" at the end. Besides it is quite difficult to say whether the characters are good or bad. The form and genre of
postmodernism is mainly the novel with elements of different genres and forms.
E.g.: Graham Swift, “Out Of This World” the novel says that human nature is very complicated, unpredictable, complex. And no one has the right to be the judge of another person. This book is a story of a grandfather, father and his daughter;
John Fowles, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” - novel has elements of different genres: historical novel, psychological novel, detective elements, adventure elements, philosophical novel.
Postmodernist literature combines fiction and non-fiction (documentary prose, statistical facts,
quotations from different documents, etc.). So, postmodernist literature combines different forms of
literature.
2) In postmodernist works history goes side by side with the present and the future. So we may speak about overlapping of time levels in these works.
3) In postmodernist works it is common to mix high culture and mass culture (or "kitsch"- pulp culture, which is the culture of very low intellectuals).
4) Combination of different moods: comic, tragic, humorous, etc. There is usually no general tone in
the books.
5) Magic realism is another feature of postmodernist literature, though the very name of this feature is very contradictory in itself. The Latin-American writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez ) invented it.
In British literature the representatives of magic realism are Salmon Rushdie and Angela Carter. Salmon Rushdie is an Indian writer and writes about Indian reality. For his “satanic Verses” he was cursed by Muslims, and sentenced to death. In the end he had to hide. In his book "Midnight’s Children" the protagonist has a magic faculty to communicate at distance.
.Angela Carter in her novel " Nights at the Circus" discusses levitation.
6) Intertextuality - the use of previously written texts and their elements as the material for postmodernist writings. Such a use of other texts can also take the form of a parody.
Postmodernist works are like pastiche (a combination of different elements). They may even combine elements of prose and poetry at the same time.
So the writer tries to modify all such elements in order to make them look similar. They often say that postmodernist works remind a kind of patchwork. And all such things as borrowings, allusions, parody (critical altitude to the primary source), patchworks (combination of different primaly sources) are one of the most vivid and bright postmodernist features.
7) Actually, in postmodernist literature there are very few social novels. And in Great Britain even if authors touch upon the problems which would be touched upon in social (so called serious) novels, dealing with contemporary realities and issues, the authors make use of various devices: they draw parallels with the past or look into the future, resorting to magic realism. In a word they write the so called experimental novels r resort to what Martin Emis (he is one of the most well-known contemporary English writers) called postmodernist trickness. He himself resorted to such a trickness in his famous novel "Time's Arrow " . John Fowles in his novel " The French Lieutenant’s Woman" introduces himself as a character of the book, in his book " The Collector" the author resorts to the device of allusion - an allusion to Shakespeare's play "The Tempest". Marina Warner in her book "Indigo" also reworks " The Tempest".