Brian McHale gave literary studies its most workable definition of the postmodern novel. Postmodernist Fiction (1987) argued that the shift from modernism was a change of dominant: modernist fiction asks epistemological questions — how can I know this world, who is telling me, how reliably — while postmodernist fiction asks ontological ones. What is a world? What happens when two of them collide inside the same book? Which of these characters is real, and real to whom? The reframing let him read Pynchon, Nabokov, Fowles, Coover and science fiction with the same apparatus, and it explained formal features that had been treated as mere trickery: the intrusive author, the character who meets his own narrator, the world that turns out to be a text. Constructing Postmodernism (1992) extended the argument, and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015) made it available to students. McHale taught for many years at Ohio State, co-edited the journal Poetics Today, and has written on the long poem and on narrative theory. His terminology remains standard equipment in the field.