In this brilliantly provocative and comprehensively informative introductory text, Niall Lucy shows the student how postmodern literary theory derives from a late eighteenth-century romantic tradition. In that tradition the Literary was concived as insaperable from the literery theoritical. But for postmoderanism , Lucy argues, what was once the romantic space of the literary becomes a general plane of human existance. There, concepts of identity, origin and truth are seen as multiple and structureless assemblages rather then as grounds for understanding human 'being' and culture.
