John Barth and the Anxiety of ContinuanceDuring the sixties and seventies, the fictional "reinventions" of john Barth, along with his misread and influential essay 'The Literature of Exhaustion," established the comic novelist as a leading practitioner and theorist of what was then coming to be called postmodern literature. In more recent years, however, Barth's reputation has been called into question within the ongoing critical debate over the criterion of "originality" and the status of