Peter Barnes as a Post-modernist Dramatist: A Study of Selected Plays

Abstract

Just as World War I marked the beginning of the great modernist literary achievement, World War II declared the eclipse of the modernist era and heralded the birth of a new literary movement, namely Postmodernism. Postmodernism is one of the great reactionary and revolutionary movements both in the history of humanity and of art. Yet to claim a definite inaugural date for its birth seems difficult. Tracing back when the term was first coined we find it in Frederico De Onis' book Ontologia de fa Poesia Americana written in 1934 where he was the first to use the term "Postomoderniso" as Ihab Hassam tells us . (Hassan : The Postmodern Turn. p.30). Another major moment in the history of postmodernism was the influential . paper "Modernity, an Incomplete Project" delivered by the postmodernist German theorist Jiirgen Habermas in 1980. The third book that introduced postmodernism to the literary stage was Baudrillard's Simulations_(l981), translated to English in 1983.