This volume, the fourth in a series of publications concerned with the analysis of postmodern American culture, takes up the issue of postmodernism, its functions and meanings, at the threshold to a new century and millennium. Critics from Europe and the United States, all of them specialists in postmodern criticism, examine various approaches to the emotionally charged fin-de-siècle and millennial sentiments from the perspectives of various disciplines such as literary and cultural criticism, history, feminism, religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and theater- and media sciences. The articles represent the broad spectrum of postmodern strategies of suvival in the confrontation with millennarian anxieties, fears, and panic.