We are in a new era of literature-or so critics and scholars are saying. Postmodern literature, the dominant aesthetic for half a century or more, is giving way to something new. Just as the postmodern era emerged from particular events in the twentieth century, the emergent aesthetic has its own key dates-the fall of the Berlin Wall, the terrorist attacks on September 11, the financial crash of 2008-which draw the high-art representation of postmodern back to earth, towards the real. While critics and scholars since the 1980s have been predicting the collapse, or abandonment, of postmodern style, they are finally being validated with evidence of a new genre, identifiable in various "returns"-to realism, to character, to politics, to the social world. The prevailing crush of theories attempting to define this movement forms a consensus around the fact that the new dominant style, regardless of what we call it, suggests a new relationship in the novel between the world and representations of that world. It's this perceived re-engagement with the world, however, that is compelling and troubling-critics have just begun to theorize the emergent shift in relation between political discourse in the novel and shifting social-political realities-but the consensus
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