To the degree The Book of Daniel and The French Lieutenant's Woman are adumbrations of the historical novel and the Victorian novel, respectively, Esslin's point seems well taken. Yet the style of The Book of Daniel, which recalls Faulkner as well as Barth in its disjunctive narrative and interior monologues, can be said to be far different from that of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Similarly, the rich narrative texture of The French Lieutenant's Woman, which very much seems to replicate the manners and mores of Victorian England, is also punctuated by frequent allusions to contemporary as well as historical culture: "She [Sarah] possessed none [books], I may add, because they were all sold; not because she was an early forerunner of the egregious McLuhan" (Fowles 35).
What, then, is postmodernism? Beckson and Ganz note two conflicting views of the term as overlapping with the modernist label that was attached to the literature of the first part of the twentieth century. The first holds that modernism is a "distinctive cultural phenomenon" that is "defined by its rejection of the literary diction and techniques of the previous [Victorian] period and by its opposition to the social and economic values of bourgeois society." On this view, the work of Joyce, Faulkner, and (T.S.) Eliot is decidedly modernist. The opposing view holds that the roots of modernism, including existentialist literature that describes an intensely subjective or "post-Freudian ethos [and] conflict between the need for individualism and the longing for communality--may arguably be traced back at least to the Romantics" (150).
The continuum of politically and socially radical nineteenth-century Romanticism and the content of modernist and postmodernist fiction as represented by those writing fiction after World War II is identifiable in the works of such romantics as Goethe and Nietzsche, such radical modernists as Sartre, Faulkner, or Brecht, and su...