It defines the key postmodern theories of language, race and gender - poststructuralism, postcolonialism and feminism - and explores their often fraught relationships with postmodernism in relation to important writers such as Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich and Salman Rushdie. The book also discusses important postmodern phenomena which are inadequately represented by postmodernist theories. It draws attention, for example, to important strands of realism in contemporary writing, and to a continuing discussion of Nature which has been crucial in the culture, for example in ecological anxieties and questionings of genetic modification, cloning and so on. This discussion has been consistently under-represented in the theory but has been a crucial theme in the literature such as in the work of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Margaret Atwood.