Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives

Lyotard shook the cultural world in the late-twentieth century by announcing postmodernism and the end of grand narratives. He captured a feeling of unease about the standpoint of great modern thinkers who claimed to have resolved the big problems of epistemology, society and history. Now, after the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is apposite to review Lyotard’s observations, which always contained more than soundbites about the end of modernity – just as there is more to Hegel and Marx than the passing of modernist certainties – and this book reviews the whole of Lyotard’s work, adopting a critical attitude to his thinking. It similarly resists taking the thought of Hegel, Marx and other grand theorists for granted, considering them appropriately to arrive at a critical reframing of modern thought in the light of Lyotard’s postmodern perspective.