Metafiction

From Unawiki

• Fiction that is concerned with fiction, i.e. in which the nature of fiction itself is explored as a subject of the text.
• Rather than concealing literary artifice, the metafictional author intentionally exposes it, thus tearing the reader from the fictional reality and creating moments of breaking through of illusion.
• For instance, a protagonist in a novel will meet its author. This strategy may have various effects: while often being used for comic or playful purposes, it may also work in making the reader dself-conscious about fiction as a medium, emphasizing that no medium is natural or transparent, and, in some cases, that reality itself is determined by language and conventions, and readers should be aware of their own positioning in language.
• Though already used by Laurence Stern in the 18th century as well as appearing in the narratives of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, M. is usually regarded as an anti-realist postmodernist technique originating in the 1960s. Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying Lot 49" and John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" and "Chimera" are among the key works of M.