The most general meaning of the postmodern form refers to its fundamental break with the era of cultural modernity extending from the Enlightenment through World War II, an era defining itself in terms of narratives of progress and liberation, an era emphasizing the universal over the various forms of cultural difference that postmodernism valorises. For various reasons (such as "Auschwitz" and "Hiroshima," to name only two examples), the myth of a universal History reaching its glorious fulfilment in the rationally ordered society became untenable in postmodern culture. Postmodernism is modernity coming of age: modernity looking at itself at a distance rather than from the inside, making a full inventory of its gains and its losses, psychoanalysing itself. Postmodern literature's covers a diversity of forms and content, much of the writing has a lack of depth and of meaning. There is a diversity of forms and content. 'Its main features include self-consciousness and reflexivity, interrogation of category distinctions, mixing of high and popular cultural forms, pastiche, parody, pluralism and radical experimentation'.
             The Hours, Michael Cunningham's third novel (for which he received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award) and Peter Weiss' The persecution and assassination of Marat as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Chareton under the direction of the marquis de Sade (referred to throughout as Marat/Sade) written in 1964, are both texts representative of postmodernism. Both Marat/Sade and The Hours are in some way involved with mental illness, but it is in their stylistic techniques founded in postmodernism (intertextuality and symbolism) that draw out further similarities.
             Every text is an intertext; other texts are present within it to varying degrees and in more or less recognisable forms. [...] Every text is a new tissue of recycled citations. Fragments of codes, fo...