Recently, I attended an event where an author made an explicit case for something which has been circulating in the air for quite some time, and which immediately struck me as intuitively correct. What he said was that we were living through a new literary movement, one that is defined not by style but by the identity of the author (and characters). I suspect others have already written about this phenomenon, which has been building for roughly my entire life.1
Postmodernism, which defined the second half of the twentieth century, has given way to a literary movement which, unlike every previous movement, is not defined by stylistic innovations. There is no unifying style or theme to this movement, only the new focus on intersectionality.
Now, I would argue that in many ways, postmodernism is still around, having profoundly influenced Western culture (in ways that I think are destructive), but for that matter romanticism and modernism are still widely influential, having contributed to various intellectual movements and ideas which we know well today.
One can read too much into the literary movement phenomenon. Rather than an all-encompassing explanatory theory of the world, categorizing writers and their work into various movements can be seen as a lens through which to understand literary history and to trace new developments and ideas. Writers within movements sometimes differed as much from each other as they did from writers in earlier movements, and certain writers defied categorization, or stubbornly clung to older conceptions and styles while rejecting whatever was current.2
All intellectual history, though, is the study of how different thinkers within various ideologies disagreed with their friends and colleagues about the very ideas they held in common (i.e., the history of conservatism is the history of conservatives disagreeing with one another about what it meant to be a conservative, the history of Marxism is the history of Marxist thinkers arguing about the development and interpretation and implementation of their ideas, the history of philosophy is the story of philosophers within the same schools debating amongst themselves, the history of liberalism is a story of liberal thinkers arguing over the definition of liberalism, etc.).