ABSTRACT
Gods and goddesses often defy the natural laws of birth and parenthood: in religious history virgin births such as that of Jesus Christ are not uncommon, and the Greek goddess Athene was believed to have leapt from the head of Zeus already fully formed, armour-clad and shouting war-cries. But intellectual movements, however revolutionary they sometimes seem to be (or are claimed by their proponents to be, or are viewed in retrospect as having been), invariably lack such melodramatic origins, and can usually be seen to have enjoyed both respectable parentage and a relatively conventional upbringing. This may be some cause of consolation – not least for pomophobes. For even postmodernism is no Athene. However loud its war-cries against traditional historians, it comes clad with its own history, in both meanings of that word: no virginal construction, it has a past, and a dubious development through time, of which historians can attempt to make some sense. Or, to put it another way, we can look back and pick out earlier intellectual developments, which can retrospectively be identified as postmodernism’s ‘antecedents’. We can construct a narrative that will show that postmodernism itself seems to be a natural (if not inevitable) outcome from, or culmination of, a number of previous ideas. In that sense, then, I’ll try in this chapter to put postmodernism into some historical context – to see postmodernism in history (the past) – and show that the force of its present flood has been supplied by a number of long-established tributary streams.
