Confusions often arise because the term ‘postmodernism’ has been used by so many in wildly different ways. In the 1950s, the term generally denoted the work of artists who parted company from the modernist conventions of the time. By the 1970s, it had been broadened from the arts and literature to incorporate architecture. For the Spanish writer and critic Federico de Onis, ‘postmodernism’ was a literary genre of poetry that sought to curb the excesses of modernism. For Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, ‘postmodernism’ was a specific historical period of late capitalism. For historian Arnold
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