section_path: 20th century/Modernism and post-modernism
section_name: Modernism and post-modernism
paragraph_text: Modernism and post-modernism
  
  James Joyce 's Ulysses (1922) had a major influence on modern novelists, in the way that it replaced the 18th- and 19th-century narrator with a text that attempted to record inner thoughts, or a " stream of consciousness ". This term was first used by William James in 1890 and, along with the related term interior monologue, is used by modernists like Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Also in the 1920s expressionist Alfred Döblin went in a different direction with Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), where interspersed non-fictional text fragments exist alongside the fictional material to create another new form of realism, which differs from that of stream-of-consciousness.
  
  Later works like Samuel Beckett 's trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953), as well as Julio Cortázar 's Rayuela (1963) and Thomas Pynchon 's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) all make use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. On the other hand, Robert Coover is an example of those authors who, in the 1960s, fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental structural concepts.
  
  The 20th century novel deals with a wide range of subject matter. Erich Maria Remarque 's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) focusses on a young German's experiences of World War I. The Jazz Age is explored by American F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Great Depression by fellow American John Steinbeck. Totalitarianism is the subject of British writer George Orwell 's most famous novels. Existentialism is the focus of two writers from France: Jean-Paul Sartre with Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus with The Stranger (1942). The counterculture of the 1960s, with its exploration of altered states of consciousness, led to revived interest in the mystical works of Hermann Hesse, such as Steppenwolf (1927), and produced iconic works of its own, for example Ken Kesey 's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Thomas Pynchon 's Gravity's Rainbow. Novelists have also been interested in the subject of racial and gender identity in recent decades. Jesse Kavadlo of Maryville University of St. Louis has described Chuck Palahniuk 's Fight Club (1996) as "a closeted feminist critique". Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek were feminist voices during this period.Furthermore, the major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries have also influenced novelists. The events of World War II, from a German perspective, are dealt with by Günter Grass ' The Tin Drum (1959) and an American by Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 (1961). The subsequent Cold War influenced popular spy novels. Latin American self-awareness in the wake of the leftist revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a " Latin American Boom ", linked to the names of novelists Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, along with the invention of a special brand of postmodern magic realism.
  
  Another major 20th-century social event, the so-called sexual revolution is reflected in the modern novel. D.H. Lawrence 's Lady Chatterley's Lover had to be published in Italy in 1928 with British censorship only lifting its ban as late as 1960. Henry Miller 's Tropic of Cancer (1934) created a comparable US scandal. Transgressive fiction from Vladimir Nabokov 's Lolita (1955) to Michel Houellebecq 's Les Particules élémentaires (1998) pushed the boundaries, leading to the mainstream publication of explicitly erotic works such as Anne Desclos ' Story of O (1954) and Anaïs Nin 's Delta of Venus (1978).
  
  In the second half of the 20th century, Postmodern authors subverted serious debate with playfulness, claiming that art could never be original, that it always plays with existing materials. The idea that language is self-referential was already an accepted truth in the world of pulp fiction. A postmodernist re-reads popular literature as an essential cultural production. Novels from Thomas Pynchon 's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), to Umberto Eco 's The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault's Pendulum (1989) made use of intertextual references.