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date: 09 February 2025

Metafictionlocked

Metafictionlocked

  • Jerome Klinkowitz

Extract

Metafiction is a style of prose narrative in which attention is directed to the process of fictive composition. The most obvious example of a metafictive work is a novel about a novelist writing a novel, with the protagonist sharing the name of the creator and each book having the same title. Such an approach defies both the tradition of the novel itself, which for over two hundred years has insisted that the form be a representative account of doings in the world, and aesthetic theory, dominant since first expounded late in the eighteenth century by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that the reader of such work will participate in a willing suspension of disbelief. The very term “novel” derives from the Italian word for “new,” and after initial experiments by eighteenth-century English novelists involving formats such as letters (Samuel Richardson) and direct authorial comment (Laurence Sterne), a mainstream developed in which the role of writers both in Britain and in the United States was to make their novels reflect, in an illusionistic manner, the persons, places, and things of a recognizable time and place.

Subjects

  • North American Literatures

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