Trenchant and panoramic, The Origins of Postmodernity traces the genesis, consol
idation and consequences of the notion of the postmodern. Beginning its exhilara
ting intellectual tour in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, it follows the change
s in the meanings and usage of the concept through to the late 1970s, when its a
doption by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jurgen Habermas first gave the idea of post
modernism wider currency. Central attention then falls on Fredric Jameson, whose
work today represents the most outstanding general theory of the postmodern.
