In general premodernism assumes that man is ruled by authority (e.g., the Catholic Church) and tradition.

With modernism, influenced by humanism and the Enlightenment, man rejects tradition and authority in favor of a reliance on reason and on scientific discovery.

Postmodernism stretches and breaks away from the idea that man can achieve understanding through a reliance on reason and science.

Modernism, with its belief in the primacy of human reason, values realism in fiction and logical narrative structures. Mary Klage says:

Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the better [i.e., the more rationally]. . .it will function.

In Modernist Fiction Randall Stevenson says:

Postmodernism extends modernist uncertainty, often by assuming that reality, if it exists at all, is unknowable or inaccessible through a language grown detached from it.

Postmodernist fiction is generally marked by one or more of the following characteristics:

• playfulness with language
• experimentation in the form of the novel
  • less reliance on traditional narrative form
  • less reliance on traditional character development
  • experimentation with point of view
• experimentation with the way time is conveyed in the novel
• mixture of "high art" and popular culture
• interest in metafiction, that is, fiction about the nature of fiction