metafiction

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English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

meta- +‎ fiction, coined in 1970 by William H. Gass[1]

Noun[edit]

metafiction (usually uncountable, plural metafictions)

  1. A form of self-referential literature concerned with the art and devices of fiction itself.
    • 1999, Susana Onega Jaén, Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd, Camden House, →ISBN, page 1:
      Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Chatterton may be described as accomplished examples of historiographic metafiction, the kind of self-conscious, heavily parodic and experimental historical […]
    • 2010, Evan Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality, SUNY Press, →ISBN, page 65:
      In the previous chapter, I presented a heuristic explanation of the development of metafiction. In this chapter, I turn to some texts written before the 1980s to demonstrate that the binary between realism and metafiction is not fixed.

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Related terms[edit]

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References[edit]

  1. ^ Patricia Waugh (1984) Metafiction, Routledge, published 2013, →ISBN, page 151: “‘Metafiction’ itself is first used as a term by William H. Gass, in Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York, 1970), p. 25.”

Further reading[edit]

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