Metafiction

✍ Scribed by Mark Currie (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 262
• Edition: 1°
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Metafiction is one of the most distinctive features of postwar fiction, appearing in the work of novelists as varied as Eco, Borges, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. It comprises two elements: firstly cause, the increasing interpenetration of professional literary criticism and the practice of writing; and secondly effect: an emphasis on the playing with styles and forms, resulting from an enhanced self-consciousness and awareness of the elusiveness of meaning and the limitations of the realist form.

Dr Currie's volume examines first the two components of metafiction, with practical illustrations from the work of such writers as Derrida and Foucault. A final section then provides the view of metafiction as seen by metafictional writers themselves.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
General Editor's Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: Defining Metafiction
Chapter 1: Metafiction
Chapter 2: What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?
Chapter 3: Metanarrative signs
Part Two: Historiographic Metafiction
Chapter 4: Historiographic metafiction
Chapter 5: British historiographic metafiction
Chapter 6: The question of narrative in contemporary historical theory
Part Three: The Writer/Critic
Chapter 7: The novel now
Chapter 8: The literature of exhaustion
Chapter 9: From Reflections on the Name of the Rose
Part Four: Readings of Metafiction
Chapter 10: The art of metafiction
Chapter 11: Metafiction, the historical novel and Coover's The Public Burning
Chapter 12: The novel, illusion and reality: the paradox of omniscience in The French Lieutenant's Woman
Chapter 13: A novel which is a machine for generating interpretations
Bibliography
Index