Metafiction
Nov. 17th, 2004 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Metafiction
Metafiction is fiction that plays with the conventions of fiction. Metafiction avoids traditional narrative by unorthodox treatment of time, space, character, and voice, but its most salient characteristic is self-referentiality -- it comments on itself as a piece of writing.
Some of the earliest fiction in English, like John Lyly's Euphues, was highly self-conscious, but Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is the great classic of fiction about fiction. In the novel, Sterne talks to the reader about how the writing is going, explains what he is going to do next, and has chapters that are blank pages to indicate he's not going to tell what went on in them. William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein sometimes would comment on their writing within their works. In Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds the characters rebel against the author for making them do things they don't like. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Borges, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass have made good fiction while ingeniously exploding its own conventions. Metafiction al devices are not limited to a small intellectual coterie. Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins have had great popular success with their highly unconventional novels.
See Avant-garde, Fairy Tale, Legend, Parable, Parody, Premise.
Metafiction
Metafiction is fiction that plays with the conventions of fiction. Metafiction avoids traditional narrative by unorthodox treatment of time, space, character, and voice, but its most salient characteristic is self-referentiality -- it comments on itself as a piece of writing.
Some of the earliest fiction in English, like John Lyly's Euphues, was highly self-conscious, but Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is the great classic of fiction about fiction. In the novel, Sterne talks to the reader about how the writing is going, explains what he is going to do next, and has chapters that are blank pages to indicate he's not going to tell what went on in them. William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein sometimes would comment on their writing within their works. In Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds the characters rebel against the author for making them do things they don't like. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Borges, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass have made good fiction while ingeniously exploding its own conventions. Metafiction al devices are not limited to a small intellectual coterie. Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins have had great popular success with their highly unconventional novels.
See Avant-garde, Fairy Tale, Legend, Parable, Parody, Premise.