ABSTRACT
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay and educated in England at Rugby and the University of Cambridge. He lived and worked in London as an advertising copy-writer before becoming a full-time writer. Rushdie has been described as a postmodernist, a fabulist and a magic realist: all terms to describe self-conscious hybridity of literary forms characterizing his novels and their working through of questions of contemporary national and cultural identity. The most shocking implications of this were revealed in the book-burning, demonstrations, murders and, of course, the issue of the fatwa following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Linda Hutcheon is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She is known chiefly for her studies of postmodernist fiction in the three volumes Narcissistic Narrative, A Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of Postmodernism. Postmodernism is commonly viewed as 'double-coded', as a mode which at once inscribes, as it undermines, literary and other norms through irony or parody.
