Post-World War II in Postmodern Literature
As you might imagine, postmodernism isn't big on boundaries and limits—which means there's not really a set date we can point to and say, "That's it! That's exactly when postmodernism began!" (Bummer, too—we love shouting stuff like that.) In fact, some folks have argued that postmodernism is more about an attitude than a historical period or a certain set of techniques.
But come on: we're literary scholars, so it'd be helpful to have some sense of how and when the movements came about. And for postmodernism, we're gonna go with…World War II.
World War II and the horror of the Holocaust had a major impact on the cultural landscape of most of the world—it couldn't help but shake things up and influence how people thought and wrote. Sure, there are some postmodernist (or proto-postmodernist?) texts that crop up before the war, but the shift between modernism and postmodernism is pretty drastic post-1945.
Chew on This
Some postmodern texts address World War II directly, but what about the more allegorical stuff? Look no further than Albert Camus' The Plague (1947). Set in the 1940s, it's about a town that's ravaged with the plague, but it conjures up a wartorn landscape. It can be seen to echo/foreshadow other wars and epidemics, too, as well as raising postmodern issues: e.g., it questions consumerism and the idea of history as progress.
How does postmodern fiction deal with a topic as heavy as the Holocaust? Just take a look at Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986-1991). Based on the experiences of Spiegelman's father (who was a Polish Jew), the novel takes an inventive approach in using the graphic novel format. And that's not all: by representing the characters as animals (e.g., the Germans are cats and the Jews are mice), it joins Animal Farm in showing how effective allegory can be in tackling serious themes.