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Abstract (summary): "What was postmodernism?" asked the prescient John Frow in 1990. And as the twentieth century came to an end, he was likely not alone in wondering what had happened to the buzz-word of the last decades of the twentieth century. Despite valiant recent attempts to move "the postmodern critique forward" (Allan), to generalize it into a "theory of the contemporary" (Connor), or to pluralize it into the more descriptive postmodernisms (Altieri), the postmodern does indeed appear to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past. Now fully institutionalized, it has its canonized texts, its anthologies, primers and readers, its dictionaries and its histories. We could even say it has its own publishing houses. (Routledge would be my candidate.) A Postmodemism for Beginners now exists; teachers' guides proliferate.