Player of Games: Iain (M.) Banks, Jean-François Lyotard and Sublime Terror

  • Cairns Craig


If the key text shaping conceptions of postmodernity is Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, then the crucial component in Lyotard’s account is the collapse of the ‘grand narratives’ that have characterised Western culture since the Renaissance, together with the global success of consumer capitalism:

The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means; it can also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism after its retreat under the protection of Keynesianism during the period 1930–1960, a renewal that has eliminated the communist alternative and valorised the individual enjoyment of goods and services.1


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For Further Reading

  1. For an up-to-date list of the works of Iain (M.) Banks, see the British Council website: <>.
  2. Craig, Cairns, Complicity: a Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2002).Google Scholar
  3. Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard (London: Routledge, 2003).Google Scholar
  4. McCracken, Scott, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
  5. Schoene, Berthold, Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
  6. Smith, Anthony D., Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Cairns Craig 2005

Authors and Affiliations

  • Cairns Craig

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