Metafictive Geography

Abstract

The imagining of space has been an important topic in recent geographical studies. Especially in the geographical study of literature, ‘literary geography’, the manner of contesting the frames of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ has aroused more and more attention during recent years. Metafiction, consciousness of a text’s own imaginativeness and the discourses behind it, has not yet been explicitly discussed in the field of literary geography, although some tangential approaches have been applied. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss how the metafictive reading of literature functions as an alternative way of approaching the imagining of space, offering an original ‘methodological’ viewpoint for perceiving space, culture and society. The specific focus is on how space becomes metafictive through literary ‘means’ such as divergent narrative and textual strategies, exceptional typographies and ironic writing. At the same time the paper considers how the metafictive continuum between the frames of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ may function as a tool for delving more deeply into the discursiveness of the human imagination.