The term metafiction was coined by critic William H.

Gass in his article Philosophy

and the Future of Fiction (1980). It largely discusses the development of the novel
and contemporary fiction and the novelists search for their own form. According to
him, it was in the eighteenth century that the novel was an art in search for a form,
adding that the novels of the earlier centuries only copied the forms from long
existing prose works such as autobiographies, journalism, lectures, and other forms
of nonfiction. These traditional forms, according to Gass, left out all the interesting
parts. This results to the content of the novels to be drawn from ordinary affairs in
ordinary life (2). He also mentions that the readership or the main audience of the
novel was the female middle class. This is because they were inherently curious and
always wanted gossip and secrets. The novel, then, became an instrument of
voyeurism (2). The audience enjoyed reading and talking about what the
characters in the novel were doingthat is, the activities of daily life. Gass goes on
further and says:
The novel was also a dense fog, incredibly full of facts. By stressing
trivia and, unlike classical tragedy, concentrating on unimportant
people, it dignified dull and uninteresting lives. A significant
consequence was that the novel raised the question of whether or not
the lives of unimportant people were actually unimportant; whether so-
called everyday things were really trivial (2).
The article then expounds on this idea by venturing on the realist genre of the
novel. For Gass, when writing a realist work, you do not try to mimic life; you imitate
prose forms that are generally considered as factual accounts. Examples of these
factual accounts are of the abovementioned nonfiction forms, i.e. journal entries,
autobiographies, histories, etc. Hence, realism in literature is not a mimesis of life,
rather realism in literature is by and large an imitation of prose forms designed to
render the facts of the world (3). And because of the novels allusionor resort to
realism, they had no inherent aesthetic quality (4). In additon, in a review of
W.L. Courtneys The feminine note in fiction (1904) by Virginia Woolf, she mentions
the realist novel had, at the turn of the twentieth century, exhausted its
possibilities as a genre (As cited in Rodriguez, 72).
Gass then moves on, discussing the different genres, forms, and techniques of
fiction and how it wouldnt work as a fundamentally true and own form for it, such
as the epistolary, history, and poetry. The novel, in search of form, even turned to
musical forms, plastic arts, drama, and movie. This was considered the
experimental period for the novels, however, the fact that they are still copying or
imitating other forms raises a question to its being experimental. Modern novelists
copied the form of the earlier novels as to somehow avoid the problem regarding
their form, or lack thereof.
The first apparent breakthrough was the interior-monologue stream of
consciousness (Gass, 6). While this is also regarded as a copy (of our interior talk), it
is without form, and so the novelist could mold it to his own designs (6).
While this breakthrough seems to have halted the mimetic tendencies of the novel
to other forms, it seems that a new genre has developed:
 And then there is the monster pf present-day metafictions. These are
works which contain, one way or the other, explanations and
references to themselves. They are fictions about fiction; not in the
obvious sense in which one of the characters is a writer, for that can be
taken up in the traditional form. Rather metafictions are fictions in
which the content of the work being structured is the structure of
traditional fiction (7).
However, neither the stream of consciousness nor metafiction really solves the
problem, which, according to Gass, may after all be a pseudoproblem of whether or
not fiction can find a form essentially its own.
The study now points to the important areas directing the development of
contemporary fiction: the theory of layers, theory of transformation, and the
microcosm-macrocosm argument. However, this ideas will not be expounded as it is
not relevant to this thesis.

To further the context of metafiction, the Chapter 2 of Patricia Waughs book,

Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction, entitled Literary self-
consciousness: developments will be presented.
In this chapter, Waugh discusses the differences of the postmodern movement from
modernism, in the context of metafiction. It is important to note that she supports
the notion that metafiction is part of the postmodern movement, contrary to what
other scholars argue. Nonetheless, she still recognizes some metafictional elements
to be present in modernist works such as:
the over-obtrusive, visibly inventing narrator, explicit dramatization of
reader, Chinese-box structures, incantatory and absurd lists, over-
systematized or overtly arbitrarily arranged structural devices, total
breakdown of temporal and spatial organization of infinite regress,
dehumanization of character, parodic doubles, obtrusive proper names,
self-reflexive images, critical discussions of the story within the story,
continuous undermining of specific fictional conventions, use of
popular genres, and explicit parody of previous texts whether literary
or non-literary (21-22).
She also claims that most contemporary experimental writings exhibits some kind
of metafictional elements, as many critics recognize as well.
Waugh proceeds arguing that the self-reflexiveness present in modernist texts
generates a spatial form (23). This has to do with the readers comprehending and
interpreting of a particular text by following the complex web of cross-references
and repetitions of words and images which function independently of, or in addition
to, the narrative codes of causality and sequence (23). With this, the reader arrives
at an understanding that the meaning of the text is constructed through internal
verbal relationships (23). This supports Waughs other claim that postmodernism
does not encompass the modernist concern with the mind as itself the basis of an
aesthetic, ordered at a profound level and revealed to consciousness at isolated
epiphanic moments (23). For critic and author of Tristram Shandy (1970),
Laurence Sterne, the mind is not a perfect aestheticizing instrument (24) for the
mind is not liberated from the constructs of language. This discussion can be further
understood with a brief explanation of the relationship of reality and language that
is deemed problematic. Since language, as might have understood by now, is not
merely a sequence of words filled with meaning by the readers. It actually has the
power to dictate what can or cannot be said, hence power on what can be perceived
as well. With this, Waugh arrives at a conclusion that realty is subjectively
constructed and how the reader is made aware of this and adds that beyond this
modernist view, the text reveals a postmodernist concern with how it is itself
linguistically constructed. Through continuous narrative intrusion, the reader is
reminded that not only characters verbally construct their own realities; they are
themselves verbal constructions, words not beings (26). With this, Waugh adds
metafiction has merely reduced the complex stylistic maneuvers of modernism to a
set of crude statements about the relation of literary fictions to the real world (26).
She proposes that there are two poles of metafiction: 1.) one that finally accepts a
substantial real world whose significance is not entirely composed of relationships
within language; and 2.) one that suggests there can never be an escape from the
prisonhouse of language and either delights or despairs in this (53).
Now she moves on to discuss two leading notions in the field of sociology that are
now regarded as aspects of metafictional writing for both have been concepts of
history/reality as a construct. These are the concepts of framing and play. These
concepts will not be discussed extensively since the literatures gathered on the
analyses of metafictional texts does not employ much of these concepts.

Perhaps to summarize all the ideas presented above concerning metafiction and its
elements, Dr. Sunt Kr Beras research, A Rhetoric of Metafiction will be introduced.
The research is primarily a study on the actual rhetorics to allow the readers of
metafictional works to understand how the authors of the works employ
metafictional techniques to be able to teach and delight (dulce et utile) them (the
readers) about language. Nonetheless, it still tackles the most relevant points to
establish the conventions of metafiction.
Metafiction is initially introduced as texts resisting the benchmarks of criticism. In
her work Innovation and redemption: What Literature Means, Cynthia Ozick, a
critic, views metafictional works and experimental writings in general as
unreadable (as cited in Bera 64). She sees this as a form of incompetence in the
part of the writers because they are abandoning their obligation to their readers by
not affixing their works in the art of didactic. In Alan Schwartz review on Robert
Scholes Fabulation and Metafiction, he states criticism is essentially didactic and
fiction, essentially mimetic (94). Ozicks belief is that fiction must be about human
beings, their actions, and the essence of life, teaching the readers on what it means
to be a human being. On the other hand, Peter Rainbowitz suggested in Truth in
Fiction: A re-examination of Audiences that:
 the more an author increases our awareness of the novel as art, the
more he diminishes our direct emotional involvement in his work. An
author who constantly exposes the structures and language which
makeup his fiction does indeed make it difficult for readers to come
emotionally involved in a world constructed from mere words (65).
This means that by being constantly reminded that the text is a linguistic and thus
fictional construct, the readers are more anchored in reality. Bera also adds that
reading metafiction is an entirely different experience and that readers who
approach these kinds of texts with the standards that are originally of traditional
literature are most likely to be frustrated, but to simply call the writers of
metafiction as lacking seriousness, substance, and a didactic purpose (65) is
outright erroneous.
Robert Scholes in Fabulation ad Metafiction proposes four modes of metafiction,
which roots from the four types of traditional fiction he mentions: formal metafiction
(from romance); structural metafiction (from myth); behavioral metafiction (from
the novel); and philosophical metafiction (from allegory) (66). However, Scholes
paid more attention not in the diverse effects of the aforementioned forms but on
the philosophical assumptions of each form and each author (66). Bera also
mentions Linda Hutcheons Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, where
the role of the reader is given light. Hutcheon relies heavily on Wolfgang Isers idea
of the reader as the co-creator or the co-author of the text.
In his conclusion, Bera reminds us that there is a difference between works that are
radically metafictional and those that merely employ metafictional techniques (68).

On Metafiction

After foregrounding the elements and techniques of metafiction, we know move on

to the metafictional analyses of texts
In Parody and metafiction: Virginia Woolfs An Unwritten Novel by Laura Maria
Lojo Rodriguez claims that metafiction is a new genre which liberates itself from the
conventions of realism. It also claims that metafiction is a tendency inherent to all
novels because of the dialogic potential of the genre (71). This analysis do not
only tackle the text but also the novel as a genre as well. Before going in on the
analysis, it is important to summarize the plot first so as to establish context. It also
must be noted that this short story is generally regarded as a modernist text.
The short story revolves around an unnamed narrator who, while on the train from
London to Eastbourne, imagines characters and scenarios for her novel, drawing
inspiration from her observations of the passenger sitting opposite her direction: an
elderly woman whom she names Minnie Marsh. Paradoxically, the background of
Minnies life that the narrator has made up seem to have allusions to realist
conventions, and thus parodies it. The devices employed in the aforementioned
instances are metafictional devices. One of the most popular device apparent in
metafictional writings includes a story of a writer writing a story. In addition, another
device of metafiction involves a story addressing the conventions of fiction, such as
building a character.

Fiction
Metafiction as Genre Fiction by Jeremy Levine (2015)

Realist fiction has a rich metafictional tradition

Mark Blackwell: metafiction as more than a reaction to the rules of realism, it
is its own genre
Psychological and physical mimesis
Authors presence, authorial intervention
Iser, reader as co-author; gaps
transaction of storytelling
Unreliable narrator
Satire as metafiction. Not all satire is metafiction.
Fiction is kaput
Metafiction takes advantage of its readerly awareness
Metafiction has a responsibility to use its commentary on fictional form
Self-ashamed vs self-conscious
Metafictional allusion
Judge the genre based on those who enjoy it

In reality, metafiction is its own genre which must be considered on its own merits
(64).
fiction can still be mimetic while ignoring the idea of continuous dream, but
these disruptions must not ruin the mimetic properties of the story. This is the
primary condition under which metafiction must operate (64).
Metafiction does not then seek to merely take advantage of the works fictional
nature, but rather acknowledge this transaction and exploit it (65).
Fiction in which the author makes an appearance is then an interesting position, in
that the author appearing is still a projected version of the author, not the actual
author. The real author uses this projection in order to contribute to the works
meaning by further manipulating the transaction of storytelling (65).
these works still must not experiment merely for the sake of it (66).
we can classify metafiction as fiction which makes commentary on forms of fiction
(or itself) in order not only to comment on forms of fiction, but also to impact the
work and expand its meaning (66).

Non-fiction
EJ in Focus: Imagining a Place for Creative Nonfiction by Douglas Hesse (2009)
 Definition of cnf
Discuss the four genres and similarities
Nonfiction novel
Authorial presence
Interpretations
Writers
Reader-response
Where is the author?

Creative nonfiction reminds us that, while facts may be waiting for finding,
interpretations are waiting for making (21).
As writers narrate themselves into the text, they stand plainly as readers of their
worlds (21).