Metafiction

Abstract

Metafiction is often used to describe avant‐garde works by American and British writers published from the 1960s up to the early 1990s, and is considered an important component of postmodernist literary style. The term was introduced by American novelist William H. Gass to describe writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed” (25). Elaborating on Gass's definition, Patricia Waugh glosses metafiction as writing “which self‐consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (2). The increasing presence of metafiction in literature during this period is connected to sociopolitical changes in the U.S. and Britain, such as the civil rights and feminist movements and the introduction of French structuralist and poststructuralist theories of language and signification into the Anglo‐American academy (see structuralism ), as well as the translation into English of works by South American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones (1944, Fictions ) and Gabriel García Márquez's Cienaños de soledad (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude) . Some features of metafiction include self‐reflexiveness about the writing process, anxiety and uncertainty regarding the authenticity of representation, and playfulness and irony in narrative voice, as well as the authorial manipulation of linguistic signs and systems. Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987), John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), William H. Gass's Omensetter's Luck (1966), Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince (1973), and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) are important examples of metafictional novels from this period.