Metafiction

Metafiction explores the great variety and effects of this popular genre and style, variously defined as a type of literature that philosophically questions itself, that repudiates the conventions of literary realism, that questions the relationship between fiction and reality, or that lies at the border between fiction and non-fiction. Yaël Schlick surveys a wide range of metafictional writings by diverse authors, with particular focus on the contemporary period.

This book asks not only what metafiction is but also what it can do, examining metafictional narratives’ usefulness for exploring the role of art in society, its role in conceptualizing the figure of author and the reader of fiction, its investigation and playfulness with respect to language and linguistic conventions, and its troubling of the boundaries between fact and fiction in historiographic metafiction, autofiction, and autotheory.

Metafiction is an engaging and accessible introduction to a pervasive and influential form and concept in literary studies, and will be of use to all students of literary studies requiring a depth of knowledge in the subject.

Yaël Schlick is Professor of English at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Her research and teaching focuses on on travel writing, autobiography, American poetry, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment (Bucknell University Press), co-editor of Refiguring the Coquette (Bucknell University Press), and translator of Victor Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism (Duke University Press).