Entertainment / Literature / Metafiction: Fiction in which the subject of the story is the act or art of storytelling of itself, especially when such material breaks up the illusion of 'reality' in a work. An example is John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which the author interrupts his own narative to insert himself as a character in the work. Claiming not to like the ending to the tale, the author sets his watch back ten minutes, and the storyline backs up ten minutes so an alternative ending can unfold. The act reminds us that the passionate love affair we are so involved in as readers is a fictional creation of an author at that point when we are most likely to have forgotten that artificiality because of our involvement. Other examples include Chaucer's narrator in the Canterbury Tales, in which the pilgrim on the journey to Canterbury tells the reader to 'turn the leaf [page] and choose another tale' if the audience doesn't like naughty stories like the Miller's tale. This command breaks the illusion that Geoffrey is a real person on pilgrimage, calling attention to the fictional qualities of The Canterbury Tales as a physical artifact--a book held in the readers' hands. Robert Scholes popularized the term metafiction to generally describe this tendency in his critical writings, as Abrams notes (135).
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Entertainment / Literature / Metaliterature: Literary art focused on the subject of literary art itself. Often this term is further divided into metapoetry, metafiction, and metadrama. MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Self-Reflexivity: Writing has self-reflexivity if it somehow refers to itself. (Critics also call this being self-referential.) For instance, the following sentence has self-reflexive traits: This is not a sentence. He MORE