The Postmodern Code of Barry Unsworth’s Novel “Morality Play”

Abstract

This article examines Barry Unsworth's novel "Moralite" (1995) through the prism of the concept of postmodern narrative, which was one of the first proposed by the American researcher Ihab Hassan. The absence, the destruction of the semantic structure – that's what, in his opinion, defines the new art at the end of the twentieth century. Postmodernism explodes from within traditional ideas about the integrity, harmony, completeness of aesthetic systems, their norms and criteria. Postmodern art is characterized by antiform, play, randomness and anarchy.