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With few exceptions, narrative theory does not ordinarily consider the self-reflexive capacity of The Thousand and One Nights beyond its canonical instance of framing, and Arabic literary scholarship does not ordinarily engage with its narratological aspects. This article proposes a narratological approach for a systematic breakdown of story cycles through abstraction, partly by making use of computer programming language, in order to demonstrate the narrative typology in the Nights. It argues that repetitions, transpositions, substitutions, and reversals testify to tensions between the overt ideology of the text and the counter discourse that unsettles this logic, concealed in its poetics. The article thereby aims to bring some of the core concepts of narrative theory into dialogue with the Nights scholarship, and to contribute to a theoretical conversation about ideological critique in narrative analysis, particularly within the pre-modern storytelling tradition. Mit wenigen Ausnahmen hat sich die Theorie der Erzähl- forschung bisher selten mit den selbstreflektiven Inhalten aus Tausendundei- ner Nacht auseinandergesetzt; die Analysen sind selten vom üblichen Kanon und dessen Rahmenbedingungen abgewichen. Das hängt auch damit zusam- men, dass sich die arabische Literaturforschung nur selten mit narrativen Komponenten beschäftigt. Dieser Aufsatz erarbeitet einen narratologischen Ansatz, der durch Abstraktion der Erzähltypen einen systematischen Zugang ermöglicht, um die narrative Typologie in den tausend Nächten aufzuzeigen. Ich nehme an, dass Wiederholungen, Transpositionierungen, Substitutionen und Umkehrungen den Schlüssel zu den inhärenten Spannungen der Texte zwischen offensichtlicher Ideologie und Gegendiskurs darstellen; ihre Analyse zeigt Widersprüche auf, die in der Poetik der Texte verborgen sind. Das Ziel ist zum einen, einen Dialog zwischen den wichtigsten narrativen Theorien und der Forschung zum Textkorpus der Tausendundeiner Nacht zu eröffnen; zum anderen hoffe ich, zu einer theoretischen Diskussion zur ideologischen Kritik in der narrativen Analyse beizutragen, insbesondere innerhalb der vormodernen Erzähltradition.

Nossa análise demonstra como se desenvolve o percurso narrativo da personagem – dos efeitos de unheimlich sentidos pela protagonista Marion Post até à rememoração do seu passado –, cuja força a faz sair de seu enclausuramento narcísico no tempo presente e, assim, proporciona a ela novas possibilidades para o futuro. Nessa perspectiva, tomamos como ponto de ancoragem teórica a psicanálise, com Freud (2019), e o conceito de rememoração da filosofia da história de Walter Benjamin, tal como explica a filósofa Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2014). Ao vincular os pensamentos de Benjamin e Freud, a autora enfatiza a relação da memória com as reflexões sobre a narração e sobre a “escrita da história”, seja ela uma história autobiográfica ou uma história coletiva. Através da narrativa fílmica, o diretor Woody Allen elabora novas formas de narrar os conflitos e os sofrimentos do sujeito moderno ao explorar os moldes clássicos do cinema hollywoodiano, como o melodrama, e de estratégias narrativas já bem aceitas pela cultura de massa, como o fantástico e a metaficção. Deste modo, o diretor atualiza esses recursos de forma crítica e criativa, transformando-os em produtos da cultura contemporânea com alta relevância estética, diferindo-os, assim, da maioria dos filmes comerciais da indústria hollywoodiana.

Manuela Gretkowska, Joanna Bator and Grażyna Plebanek: three female authors, each of them involved in the ‘pro-woman’ discourse. Are the literary testimonies of this discourse and the figurations of femininity in their prose subject to synthesis in terms of the heroines’ freedom aspirations? What is the freedom of women in the light of these texts? The comparative procedure consists of three steps. Firstly, a comparison of the worlds presented in the dimension of the protagonists’ fates and the final storyline solutions. Secondly — of the functionality of the chosen state of aggregation within the plot, i.e. eroticism as a set of specific images (or anti-images) of the protagonists’ experiences. Thirdly — comparing the narrative structures (e.g. the role of metafiction), as well as attempting to determine what the selected modus operandi of each narrative results in.

This essay argues that the historical imagination of J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Foe (1987), reaches beyond the notion of historical metafiction. It shows that the nexus between the literary and the historical rests upon the fiction of a past future, situated before the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724). It is the fiction of an open, undetermined future within the past that allows the novel to contradict the narratives that were eventually fixed by Defoe. Based upon reflections about the theory of history, I suggest that the struggle over authorship and the novel’s’ narrative presupposes the difference between historical experience and literary representation. Besides evoking and objecting to models and codes that shaped literary communication in the eighteenth century, Foe reflects about the limits of representation and the incommensurability of history.

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), the novel about Shakespeare’s son and wife, is considered as the continuation of postmodernist interest in Shakespeare exemplified by A. Burgess’s and R. Nye’s novels about the Bard. However, O’Farrell’s approach to history through the lens of everyday family life, her present-tense narrative and especially her manner of reinterpreting the historical facts all point to another, more recent literary influence – Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels.

This article examines how historiographic metafiction challenges traditional narratives of history. The author argues that subverting conventions of narrating the past through irony and a plurality...

Undoubtedly, the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century are notable for the extensive artistic experiment, including metatextual and metafictional phenomena. Such scholars as Gérard Genette, Anna Wierzbicka, Patricia Waugh, Linda Hutcheon, Robert Sholes, and many others focused on the mentioned issues in their research work. Therefore, this paper considers metatextuality and metafiction in the theoretical perspective tracing the origins of metatextuality and its connections with postmodern literature. The terms ‘metatext’ and ‘metafiction’ appeared as rather close in time. Notably, both of them are based on the discursive practices of the late 20th century. However, the term ‘metatext’ originated in the scholarly practice of structuralism. It is obvious that ‘metatext’ was constructed by analogy with the concept of ‘metalanguage’. Either of them does not exist without the initial text (or language). Metatextual elements are important for analyzing styles, genres, types of expression, discursive functions, and more. On the other hand, the term ‘metafiction’ has an obvious connection with genre studies. Metafiction qualifies as a special kind of literary text that became characteristic of the postmodern era. Such features as self-referentiality of artistic expression, introspection, and self-consciousness became essential for postmodern aesthetics. Metatextuality relates to the narrative theory and metacritiсism, while metafictionality is applicable within the intertextual analysis. Thus, the paper highlights an advance of metadiscourse in the cultural consciousness of the late 20th century.

Este artículo analiza la manera en la cual la novela inglesa Fanny Hill (1748) de John Cleland sintetiza el idealismo cervantino, propio de la novela sentimental, y el realismo, heredero de la picaresca femenina. Al situar esta obra en la gesta de la novela dieciochesca inglesa, especialmente frente a las obras de Samuel Richardson y en constante diálogo con el legado picaresco y cervantino, Fanny Hill emerge como una novela compleja, metaficticia y reflexiva. En su reflexividad, Cleland se enfoca en analizar los mecanismos de la novela en general y de la novela pornográfica en particular. Los mecanismos que se destacan son la reflexión sobre el ejercicio literario, el registro lingüístico y la recepción. Sobre todo, Fanny —como “narradora”— se detiene a analizar con detalle el savoir faire de la novela pornográfica en la cual el tema central del sexo, en cuanto mecánico y repetitivo, exige una narrativa mecánica y repetitiva. Finalmente, el artículo destaca la complicada agencia simbólica, literaria, económica y de género, que despliega la “narradora” Fanny ante otras protagonistas de la novela inglesa, como Pamela o Clarissa. Al enfatizar la síntesis que la novela hace del idealismo y del realismo, así como su constante reflexividad, arguyo que Fanny Hill debe ser considerada más que una obra exclusivamente pornográfica y entrar en el canon de la novela inglesa del dieciocho.

In the given article, we examine the characteristic features of literary onyms functioning in the magical realism collection “Strange Pilgrims” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The research has been done in the framework of modern onomastic studies. The results of the investigation show that proper names in each tale form an amalgam of real and fictional proper names. As for their function, real proper names create realistic backgrounds for the magical story, while fictional proper names add expressivity and contain implicit meanings. The research is also centered on the problem of the socalled “real” names compared to the names invented by the author. Our analysis of factual material enabled affirmation that the both types are of similar nature. The amalgam of “strange” anthroponyms and realistic toponyms is seen as the element of defamiliarization (the Russian term for it is “ostranenie”), which, in magical realism, means the balance between supernaturalisation (the fact of transforming the known world into the fantastic one) and naturalisation (the “banalisation” of the fantastic). Concerning the structure and the semantics of the names, we observe such types as hybrid or heteroclite names, parody names, names-allusions, and names-elements of metafiction. Hybrid or heteroclite names, typical of postmodernism, consist of elements of heterogeneous nature; they unite Spanish elements with, among others, elements of English-speaking culture. Names-elements of metafiction imply facticity of the described characters and events, thus making part of the so called Jakobsonian poeticity, “when a word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named”. The above mentioned observations conform to the peculiarities of magical realism as a sub-movement of postmodernism.

The historical note is a familiar device in historical fiction. While such devices have begun to attract scholarly attention, the focus has typically been on the way they signal the genre’s relationship to truth. This article proposes instead to look at how historical notes rework an understanding of the story and its source material by breaking the frame between events retold in fiction, and narrative history. Frame breaking, or metalepsis, is the preserve of experimental fiction, and usually consists of authors placing themselves in their work, or characters engaging with their author. Behind this playful inversion lies a preoccupation with the porous boundaries established between ontologically distinct worlds. I contend that the same destabilising effect can be found in the transition from story to historical note, with the reader carrying ideas from the story into the world of narrative history, and vice versa. Rather than separating the story from ‘what actually happened’, historical notes perform the opposite function. Drawing on examples from literature, film, and TV, I argue that frame breaking in historical fiction inserts the ambiguities of art into a mode of historical representation that remains a popular means of disseminating the truth.

f on a winter's night a traveler is considered one of the greatest novels by Italian writer Italo Calvino. Published in 1979, this literary work, which belongs to the postmodernist narrative style in the form of a frame story, tells about a reader trying to read a book with the same title from beginning to end. Much of the story’s content was written in the second-person’s narration, implying that “you” (the Reader) are the protagonist of the novel. Embedded inside are ten short stories (the loose ends of different novels) read by the main character, which causes the book to constantly switch between settings, narrators, and styles. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is truly a perfect illustration for the literary style characterized by metafiction and postmodernism. The novel is a conscious textual play with various techniques employed such as authorial role limitation, reader involvement in the plot line, open structure, non-linearity, fragmentation, multiplicity, and intertextuality. By effectively using these devices, Calvino deconstructs the traditional novel form and creates a new structure which shows a parallel between the processes of writing and reading a text. Calvino acts as the supreme game-master taking control of both the characters and the real players, who have been pushed into this game-like novel. This article focuses on analyzing the charactericstics of metafiction, the Droste effect and deconstruction in Calvino’s novel If on a winter's night a traveler, thereby helping to grasp his playful language and his narrative techniques as well as to discover his metafictional discourse.

The text is an attempt to present what a postmodern picture book for children is. The main thesis indicates the tendency to break the traditional discourse, inscribed in children’s books. Ear-lier it was used mainly in parodies of this type of literature. Authors such as Edward Gorey, Ruth Krauss, and Maurice Sendak, may be considered precursors of post-modern picture books. Contem-porary artists using similar poetics are Raymond Briggs, Chris Van Allsburg, David Wiesner, and Jon Scieszka. Their characteristic features of narration are references to other works, the strategy of unmasking the fictionality of the message and the idea of revealing the materiality of the book. The issue of metafiction came to the fore in theoretical considerations about post-modern picture books from 2018. This kind of academic research can be considered as a manifestation of a broader tendency to constitute a new relationship between the recipient and the text of culture, excluding the naive reception of the reader.

Felsefi ve sosyolojik açıdan Postmodernizm’in en çok hangi alana/disipline yansıdığı sorusuna bir cevap bulmak aslında güç değildir. “Postmodern müzik” veya “postmodern sinema” gibi kavramlar “postmodern edebiyat” kadar sık duyulmamaktadır. Ayrıca Lyotard’ın disiplinlerarası ayrımı reddetmesi ve Postmodernite ile birlikte “interdisipliner” ile “transdisipliner” gibi kavramların önem kazanması gibi gerçekler göz önünde bulundurulduğunda Postmodernizm’in edebiyat disiplini ile ilişkisini vurgulamak bu açıdan “mantık dışı”dır. Buna rağmen, “Postmodernizm” ve “roman”ı iki farklı disipline ait kavramlar olarak görsek bile, birbirlerine olan bağları oldukça sıkıdır. Edebiyatın anlatı dünyasının belki de en büyük ürünü olan romanın Postmodernizm’den aldıkları romanı farklı bir boyuta taşımıştır. Postmodern roman göze ilk bakışta bir dönem gibi görünse de bir türdür. Modernite sonrası dönemde yazılmış her romanın postmodern roman olduğunu iddia edemeyiz. Postmodern romanı postmodern roman yapan metinlerarasılık, üstkurmaca gibi öğeler modernite sonrası yazılmış her romanda mevcut değildir. Bunların dışında (bazıları alt tür) montaj, kolaj, pastiş, parodi, ironi gibi tekniklerde de aynı durum söz konusudur. Yazarın dehasını ve okurun aptallığını ön plana süren postmodernist romancı/roman yazarı sayısı, geri kalan sayısız roman yazarının yanında sınırlıdır. Dünyada Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Paul Auster, Patrick Süskind; Türk edebiyatından Oğuz Atay, Orhan Pamuk gibi sınırlı sayıda romancılar postmodern roman örnekleri sunmaktadır. Bu çalışmada, okuma süreci “kaliteli” okur için oldukça yorucu ama bir o kadar zevkli olan, “aptal” okura ancak sınırlı bilgi sunan postmodern romanlar tartışılmaktadır. Postmodern romanların, postmodern öğelerinin neler oldukları irdelenmekte ve okurun bu öğelerden biri haline nasıl dönüştüğü sorgulanmaktadır.

Based on the narrative mechanisms of the short film, the article addresses its use of clichés and tropes. The focus is on the migration of these tropes from a narrative position to a thematic level ‐ a migration regarded as a metafictional device with the aim of explaining the fate of the main character.

Kurt Vonnegut’s position that artists should be treasured as alarm systems and as biological agents of change comes most pertinent in his two great novels. The selected English novels of the past century – Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) – connect the world of fiction to the harsh realities of the world via creative metafictional strategies, making literature an alarm coated with the comforting lies ofstorytelling. It is metafi ction that enables Vonnegut to create different understandings of historical events by writing a kind of literature that combines facts and fiction. Defi ned as a kind of narrative that “self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as artefact” metafiction stands against the duplicitous “suspension of disbelief” that is simply an imitation and interpretation of presumed realities. As a postmodern mode of writing it opts for an undisguised narration that undermines not only the author’s univocal control over fiction but also challenges the established understanding of the ideas. Multidimensional display of events and thoughts by Vonnegut works in direction of metafiction to give readers a self-conscious awareness of what they read. Hiroshima bombing in 1946 and the destruction of Dresden in Germany by allied forces in World War II are the subjects of the selected novels respectively. In them Vonnegut presents a creative account in the form of playful fictions. The study aims to investigate how the novelist portrayed human mentality of the American culture by telling self-referentialstories that focus on two historical events and some prevailing cultural problems.

It would not be hard to write an essay that treats The Cat in the Hat as a fable for the United States in the age of President Donald Trump. An unpredictable and charismatic figure in a trademark red and white hat (the Cat) blasts onto the stage, upending the unwritten rules of decorum with his wild antics to the simultaneous delight and befuddlement of his constituency (“Sally and I”) all while hectoring nay-sayers (the fish) fret and declare that this is quite irregular and should not be tolerated until things get out of hand and order is reestablished, but not without a sneaking sense that allowing this to have happened at all is a frightening transgression (“Now, what should we do? What would you do if your mother asked you?”). Thankfully, one of America's most influential experimental writers already did it for us, in 1968, when Robert Coover published The Cat in the Hat for President: A Political Fable.

The article deals with a phenomenon called metafiction. This phenomenon, thoroughly studied by Western European and American philologists, is now considered basing on Chinese literature – from the first publications in the late 1980s to modern monographs; the paper gives a brief introduction into scientific articles and monographs of Chinese and Russian scholars who played a key role in the study of metafiction. The author of the article identifies its main features and summarizes the existing concepts of Chinese literary scholars. Particular attention is paid to the «Chinese characteristics» of metafiction. The author distinguishes the differences between the concepts of «metafiction» and «metafictional»: while the former is primarily associated with modern Chinese literature, the latter is used more widely and is even applied to ancient Chinese novels. The article also shows the evolution of the attitude of Chinese literary scholars towards metafiction: from agreement with Western scholars to the emergence of dialogue with them. To sum up, the author of the article describes unresolved problems of this phenomenon and prospects for the study of it in detail.

South Asian English fiction, in recent decades, has significantly manifested its deepest concern for history and its relevance in the contemporary global scenario. The last couple of years have noticed the publication of many English novels by Indian and Pakistani authors that in fact belong to the very genre of postmodern historiographic metafiction. In fact, postmodern fiction writers usually deviate from the traditional representation of past events. The current study examines the way history writing is reconfigured in the selected postmodern novel. In these novels, the writers retell the traditional history through innovative narrative techniques and multiplicity of the views that de-centralize the conventional history. The present research attempts to explore Amitav Gosh’s The Glass Palace and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows as historiographic metafiction, that is a sub-genre of postmodern fiction. The study focuses on the selected texts to explore how these novels transform the traditional history through the incorporation of magic realism, intertextuality and self-reflexivity. This research is qualitative and descriptive, while the textual analysis has been used as a research method. The theoretical concept of Linda Hutcheon is incorporated in this current study that ends with findings and recommendations for future research.

In this paper, we aim at discussing the figure of the reader and the reading processes in Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth. To do so, we propose an articulation between the theoretical discourses on metafiction and the theory of aesthetic response. Drawing from theoretical frameworks elaborated mainly by Iser (1972, 1978, 1989, 2006) – regarding the theory of aesthetic response – and by Hutcheon (1980, 2000) and Waugh (1984) – regarding metafiction – we understand parody and mise en abyme as two metafictional procedures that constitute the structure of the implied reader. In this sense, if these metafictional creative strategies make the reading activity more complex, they also function as guiding systems to the reader, allowing him to pursue answers to the enigmas articulated within the novel. Parody and mise en abyme, for McEwan, are powerful tools in what we might perceive as a project to develop more proficient readers.

This study traces the signs of metawriting or metafiction as a phenomenon in a literary sample written by al-Rāfi‘ī in 1924. More specifically, the study investigates the features of this phenomenon in al-Rāfi‘ī’s book “Rasā’il ’al-’Aḥzān (Letters of Sorrows)”. The study attempts to answer the following questions: How did al-Rāfi‘ī work with metafiction before it appeared as a literary phenomenon at the end of the twentieth century? And how was metafiction reflected in his literary writings? We do indeed find that al-Rāfi‘ī talked about the author, the narrator and the implied author. He also talked about metalanguage and about writing as a craft, discussing its processes, purposes, methodologies and expressive techniques as well as exploring the relationship between the author and the implied reader. All of these are considered metafictional features, thus proving our hypothesis that metafiction as a phenomenon had existed before the end of the twentieth century, and that al-Rāfi‘ī used various metafictional features in his writings. نتتبع في هذه الدراسة إرهاصات لظاهرة الميتاكتابة أو الميتاقص، في نموذج أدبي للرافعي من عام 1924. حيث تستقصي الدراسة ملامح الظاهرة في كتابه "رسالة الأحزان". تحاول الدراسة الإجابة عن السؤال: كيف اشتغل الرافعي بالميتاكتابة قبل أن تكون ظاهرة أدبية كما ظهر في نهاية القرن العشرين؟ وكيف انعكست الميتا كتابة في كتاباته الأدبية؟ نجد أن الرافعي قد تحدّث عن المؤلف والراوي والمؤلف الضمنيّ، وعن الميتالغة وعن الكتابة كصنعة، سيرورتها والغاية منها، منهجيتها وأدواتها التعبيرية، كما تحدث عن علاقة المؤلف بالقارئ الافتراضي المروي له. يعتبر كل ذلك ملامح ميتاقصية، مما يثبت فرضيتنا أن الظاهرة الميتاقصية وجدت قبل نهاية القرن العشرين، وأن الرافعي استخدم بعضا منها. Article visualizations

Pale Fire is one of the most representative works of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. It is always seen by the academia as metafiction. Indeed, several features of this novel show that this novel is clearly metafiction. This article tries to analyze the three most distinctive features of Pale Fire, to explain why it is metafiction.

This study offers a reading of the early nineteenth-century Chinese novel Jinghua yuan 鏡花緣 (Flowers in the Mirror) by Li Ruzhen 李汝珍 (1763–1830?) as a fiction about fiction making. Contextualizing the novel in a society where the civil service examinations are among the most important cultural institutions, this article considers the protagonist Tang Ao's 唐敖 voyage to bizarre, fantastical islands, narrated in the early chapters of the novel, as an account of his conversion from examination scholarship to fiction creation. From these islands, his symbolic realm of fictionality, he sends flower spirits-turned-girls to China for the female examinations, here interpreted as an enterprise to fictionalize the examination system. Thus the narrative of the girls' participation in the exams and ensuing celebrations in later chapters becomes a fiction within the fiction. Discussing the dynamic between the examinations and fiction writing elevated in the metafictional structure of the novel, this study considers Tang Ao a fictional representative of many scholars in late imperial China, whose experience with the examinations was not merely a cause of intense frustration but also an inexhaustible source of literary inspiration.

The article discusses Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Manaraga as a metafictional statement concerning the problem of the literary canon. The proposed interpretation places the novel in the post-ironic thinking, within which the value of high culture is still in force.

The article deals with the phenomenon of the authorial self-fashioning in the contemporary German literature. The “increased visibility” of the author in his literary work is considered as a well-planned strategy to attract readers’ attention to the writer and his work in the situation of media competition. Taking into account contemporary classification, the article distinguishes between extra-textual and intra-textual self-fashioning. The study is focused on the textual forms of authorial self-fashioning and their functions in the novels by T. Glavinic “Isn’t That Me” and W. Haas “The Weather Fifteen Years Ago”. The study proved that the image of the author can be reconstructed from various projections – the writer as an ambitious loser who envies his more famous competitors (T. Glavinic) or the writer as a successful craftsman, who publishes romance novels and understands the needs of readers (W. Haas). In both works, which are examples of metafiction, the authors endow their character with autobiographical features. The identity of names, some facts of a real biography, references to their own works enable writers to model a pseudo-reality and construct an artificial image of themselves for the sake of provocative play with the reader. It is shown that T. Glavinic in his novel “Isn’t That Me” mocks the position of the readers, who always try to identify the narrator with the author. W. Haas in his novel “The Weather Fifteen Years Ago”, which is a fake interview with the author, criticizes mediocre readers and tendency to entertaining genres of literature. It is emphasized that the authors, turning to various forms of self- fashioning, appeal, first of all, to the readers who are attracted by any sort of authenticity and try to find the biographical trace in literary fiction. The analysis of the novels proved that the author’s self-fashioning in his own work is a medium used to imitate authenticity and criticize average tastes of the readers who turn into consumers of popular fiction. Likewise, self-fashioning can be described as an ironic auto-commentary and an effective strategy of self-promotion.

How do fictional tactics operate in what is often simplistically termed the “factual” or referential world of autobiographical discourse? Many narratologists view the rhetorical figure of metalepsis as distinctive to metafictional texts and constitutive of “fictional” narration, which they posit in antithesis to “factual” narration. But regarding autobiographical narrative only within the realm of fact ignores its complexity. While some theorists of autobiographical narrative have read it through the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia, as elaborated by Paul de Man in characterizing its “de-facement” of subjectivity, we argue that the figure of metalepsis operates productively in autobiographical narrative, particularly hybrid and experimental texts. The use of metalepsis shifts levels or layers of narration across temporal and spatial planes in ways that confuse its diegetic and metadiegetic levels. That is, autobiographical narrative, while filtered through the récit factuel, is not consistently fixed in an extratextual, ontologically unified, referential world. We pursue this argument by exploring four cases: the circuit of transfer in incomplete conversion narrative (Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson); palimsistic seepage between the Bildungsroman and trauma narrative (Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius); narrative collision of “parallel universes” (Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted); and unstable witness to collective trauma by a second-generation narrator (Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale). Recent critical studies of metalepsis also probe how it presses at the limits of referentiality in life narratives by J. M. Coetzee, Javier Marías, and Christine Brooke-Rose. In sum, autobiographical narrative is by no means a referential, “monologic” mode easily differentiated from the dialogism and metadiscursivity of the novel; rather, it is a mode unsettled by figural, discursive, and temporal boundary-crossing.

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of ...

The use of metafictive devices in children's literature, in particular contemporary picturebooks, has been explored by numerous scholars working from different theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds. In particular, metafiction is often described as oppositional to traditional children's literature which often produces stable, knowable, readable texts which set out to seduce the child reader. Unlike traditional, linear narratives, metafiction highlights the constructed nature of fictional texts and calls attention to the distinction between fictional storyworlds and the real world of the reader. The purpose of this article is to share the results of a variation of qualitative content analysis, what we are calling multimodal content analysis (MMCA), to systematically investigate the ways authors, illustrators, and publishers use various metaleptic transgressions, or the devices used for breaching, disrupting, or transgressing of narrative, rhetorical, and ontological boundaries in the rendering of a fictional narrative in contemporary narrative picturebooks.

The article is devoted to interpretation a figure of explicit reader in Vladimir Korolenko’s “Story of my Contemporary” (chapter “My first Acquaintance with Dickens”). Short story moderated the trajectory of reading at distinguishing between narrative and perception modes. Representing the world of the Zhytomyr province, the writer shows reading as a specific activity that is part of the daily routine for inhabitants. The story of reading a little hero – from the “colorful” and “spicy” reading adventurous and detective novels to meaningful reading of Dickens’ book – demonstrates specific changes in the psychology of the little hero (from Oliver Twist to David Copperfield). A specific feature of this text is the reflection of the young reader on everything what is happening in the book in particular and on the nature of one’s own reading in general. At the beginning of the story, the main feature of the reading of the hero is noted, his abruptness, episodic, covering only the surface of the plot. Central motive of the struggle of two brothers, having as a biographical and mythopoetic sense. That is closely connected with a qualitative transformation Reader becoming a Writer. In addition, the older brother was an authority for the youngest, including in reading, therefore, in addition to the “episodicity” of reading, it was also secondary and in his perception of certain works the young the reader relied on the experience of his older brother, who does not mark the image of the ideal the reader, dividing everything into so-called κῶμος and τράγεος. Despite the fact that the main character is experiencing the text of Dickens as Revelation, experience reading his novel practically did not differ from previous reading experience. So the novel was without a name, also remained an unread hero and was not even understood by him until the end. And it is the figure of the elder brother-authority that changes the main trajectory “Anonymity” of children's reading, the first time calling the last name of the writer Dickens. In conclusion hypothesis about the specific metatext character of the fragment under consideration is presented. That allows to consider it as an auto-commentary on other works of the author, in particular, his story “In a Bad Society”.

The rewrite the experiences of those who lived it, urging readers to look over the epic, tragic, and offensive facet of their history. The purpose of this study is to show how and why authors used the traumatic history of their countries as settings for their novels. By using historiographical metafiction as a device for investigating both novels; Novel without a Name 1995 and The Disappeared 2008 this study would be able to prove that these novelists re- write and re-present history by enfolding it into fiction to generate together accessibility and reasonability for recovering and reforming the history of minorities, which have been suppressed long ago. These texts can be considered as historiographic metafiction since they combine historical personage parody and metafictional self-reflexivity to present what the recorded history fails to present.

Feminism developed and widened its scope to different disciplines such as literature, history, and sociology. It is associated with various other schools and theories like Marxism and poststructuralism, as well. In the field of literature, feminist literary criticism managed to throw away the dust that cumulated on women’s writing and succeeded in raising interest in those forgotten female artists. Some critics in the field of feminism claim that there are no separate spheres, masculine and feminine, whereas others have opted for post-feminist thinking. Some women writers used metafiction to write literary criticism. Therefore, how do Gaskell and Woolf implement metafiction in their stories? Accordingly, this work aims at shedding light on Wives and Daughters by Gaskell and Orlando by Woolf to tackle metafiction from a feminist perspective. Examples from both novels about intertextuality, narration, and other aspects, that are part of metafiction, will be provided to illustrate how and where metafiction is used.

William Gass coined the term “metafiction” in 1970 to get a handle on then-recent and innovative fictions by Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. In the critical context of the early 21st century, however, the term should be understood to name any fiction exhibiting a concern with the process, philosophy, and consequences of fiction-making. The history of metafiction is longer than that of the English-language novel. Metafictions dating from the last decade of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st typically concern themselves with the situation of discourse: they portray their characters awash in language that is potent because its origins and effects are myriad. Such metafictions ask how, why, and from where literary or narrative discourse stages its arrival on the page. In contrast, the major innovations of postmodernist, mid-20th-century metafictions are rightly characterized by Brian McHale as “ontological”; they urgently question the nature of reality as their language transports authors, narrators, readers, and characters among the different existential frames of history and fiction, past and present, and textual and corporeal reality. As a result of this difference, there is a gap between metafictional practice of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and the work of metafiction’s most influential critics: Gass, Robert Scholes, Linda Hutcheon, and Patricia Waugh, all of whom studied the varieties of metafiction in the 1970s and 1980s. As contemporary metafictions attend to the situation of discourse, they dramatize how pieces of language move—not just across pages, but across plots, cultures, and philosophies. Various motives drive this contemporary interest in dramatizing how language moves and touches, including the influence of Deconstruction in the American academy. Deconstruction, like Marxist and psychoanalytic criticism, writes drama into the very making of meaning. Contemporary ideas and materials—from Twitter narratives to viral memes to massively multiplayer online role-playing games—have mobilized discourse in new ways and transformed many of the philosophical puzzles of mid-20th-century metafiction into aspects of lived reality. Contemporary metafiction, consequently, puts metafictional devices and concerns into a new relationship with representation (mimesis). The world has caught up with metafiction, if it ever really lagged behind, and new forms of metafiction are being developed now to activate metafiction’s older questions anew.

My study is an attempt to examine recent developments in post-Arab Spring fiction by Anglo-Arab immigrant authors. Instead of conforming to the traditional narrative modes and strategies, post-Arab Spring literature provides a bitter evaluation of the so-called Arab Spring and deconstructs the revolutionary rhetoric that heralds a new era for the Arab world by producing a counter-narrative. The selected novels, Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Youssef Rakha’s The Crocodiles, use peculiar strategies to portray the fractured and cryptic realities of the Arab world. Written within the framework of realism, utilizing the literary strategies of postmodern literature, these writers unsettle the boundaries of literary genres and give rise to diverse phenomenal trends in Arab fiction. Using magical realism, Alrawi expands the traditional realist narrative style by blending realist elements with magical. By employing metafiction, Rakha formally exhibits the precarious scenario of the Arab world. Drawing on the theory of Magical Realism and Metafiction, these works are investigated in order to emphasize how this new writing reflects the unstable reality of the Arab Spring. While it is too early to discern the characteristics of Post-Arab Spring literature, my research is a contribution to developing a framework in which to do so.

International audience; "Neo-Gothic" implies a resumption of an old genre revisited. Writers collaborating to The New Gothic by Morrow and McGrath tended to interpret that novelty in terms of interioriza-tion as opposed to the prevalence of decor and the paraphernalia of exterior effects. Is this however sufficient to determine a renewed genre "per se"? Chronology is often the only criterion to implement the concept of neogothicism relying mostly on analogy between works of the past and more recent productions through repetition or pastiche. Parody however opens up new vistas , principally in terms of plurigeneric creations. Hence the link between Postmodernism and the Neo-Gothic, both connected and also akin to a new "grotesque" close to the absurd, very much in tune with the age of deconstruction.

Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (ca. 1905, 1908, 1909) has striking similarities to Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857). These two books mark the evolution of American modernism to an early form of postmodernism—most notably in their similarly complex treatments of novel and romance genres, the nature of identity, disrupted narrative techniques, metafictional elements, and speculation on the relation of fiction and reality. In both works, the presumption of a single unitary self is under assault, along with moral, religious, and existential concepts of selfhood. Melville's and Twain's criticisms of the concept of the single self not only recognize multiple selves in general, but also focus on author/reader mutual identities. Twain's book becomes an ironic indictment of any reader who reads it.