Metafiction

Metafiction is fiction that draws attention to its own status as an invented work, often by exposing its storytelling devices or addressing its audience.

Breaking the Fourth Wall: A dramatic technique in which a character directly addresses the audience or acknowledges the work’s artifice. Direct address makes the fiction’s audience visible inside the story.
Don Quixote: Miguel de Cervantes’s novel about a man whose reading of chivalric romances shapes his adventures. Its characters encounter the fame and reception of the novel’s earlier volume.
Metanarrative: A narrative or discourse that reflects on how narratives are constructed, interpreted, or authorized. Metafiction is a literary form of reflection on storytelling and narrative authority.
Miguel de Cervantes: The Spanish writer best known for the two-part novel Don Quixote, published in 1605 and 1615. Don Quixote helped establish the novel’s capacity to reflect on its own fictionality.
Realism: A literary mode that seeks to represent ordinary life and social conditions with recognizable detail. Metafiction often interrupts the illusion of an unmediated, realistic world.
Frame Story: A narrative structure in which one story encloses or introduces another. Nested narrators can expose how stories are framed and transmitted.
Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne’s novel whose narrator repeatedly interrupts and reflects on the difficulty of telling his life story. Its digressions and typographic experiments turn narration into an explicit subject.
Historiographic Metafiction: A postmodern literary mode that questions historical knowledge while foregrounding its own fictional form. It combines metafictional self-awareness with the construction of historical narratives.
Laurence Sterne: An eighteenth-century English novelist whose best-known work is Tristram Shandy. His narrator’s interruptions and formal play became lasting models of self-conscious fiction.
Anti-Novel: A novel that rejects or disrupts conventions associated with conventional plot, character, or narration. Some metafictional works use anti-novel techniques, but the terms describe different features.

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