Post-Modern Aura

The Post-Modern Aura is Charles Newman’s classic and incendiary polemic about the Post-Modern attitude in fiction, culture, and sensibility. In it, he challenges the revolutionary claims of avant-garde novelists and literary theorists as well as the arguments of neoconservatives, neorealists, and advocates of moral fiction. Newman argues that neither of these groups confront the unprecedented break with tradition entailed by an economics and culture of inflation. A combination of cultural critique, literary criticism, economic forecast, and historical jeremiad, The Post-Modern Aura is finally a positive statement, celebrating The Act of Fiction and suggesting how the forces which have been devaluing it might be overcome. In the twenty-first century as an interest in Marxist thought again coincides with the specter of financial inflation, The Post-Modern Aura is timely again.