metafiction

English

Etymology

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

Noun

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.

Derived terms

Translations

See also

References
  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
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