Crossing the Boundaries between Modernist and Postmodernist Poetics: the Critical Reception of Jeanette Winterson’s Novels

Abstract

Since Jeanette Winterson‟s works display an electrifying combination of features, some characteristic to modernist poetics, others representative for postmodernist poetics, this paper aims to assess the oppositional critical claims that tend to assign Winterson‟s novels to the postmodernist trend and, respectively, to the modernist tradition, by taking into account both the author‟s work (fictional, as well as non-fictional) and her own self-proclaimed affiliation to modernism.

Keywords

• modernism
• postmodernism
• taxonomic controversies
• contemporary literary writing
• a wintersonian ars poetica