Working through the issue of representation, in art forms from fiction to photography, Linda Hutcheon sets out postmodernism's highly political challenge to the dominant ideologies of the western world.

Linda Hutcheon is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She has published extensively on postmodernism, parody and irony (including Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony) and has recently done interdisciplinary work with Michael Hutcheon on opera and medicine (Opera: Desire, Disease and Death, and Bodily Charm: Living Opera).

General editor's preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Representing the postmodern: What is postmodernism? Representation and its politics, Whose postmodernism? Postmodernity, postmodernism, and modernism. 2. Postmodernist representation: De-naturalizing the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history. 3. Re-presenting the past: 'Total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text. 4. The politics of parody: Parodic postmodern representation, Double-coded politics, Postmodern film? 5. Text/image border tensions: The paradoxes of photography, The ideological arena of photo-graphy, The politics of address 6. Postmodernism and feminisms: Politicizing desire, Feminist postmodernist parody, The private and the public. Concluding note: some directed reading. Bibliography. Index.