ABSTRACT

Metafiction begins by surveying the state of contemporary fiction in Britain and America and explores the complex political, social and economic factors which influence critical judgment of fiction. The author shows how, as the novel has been eclipsed by the mass media, novelists have sought to retain and regain a wide readership by drawing on the themes and preoccupations of these forms. Making use of contemporary fiction by such writers as Fowles, Borges, Spark, Barthelme, Brautigan, Vonnegut and Barth, and drawing on Russian Formalist theories of literary evolution, the book argues that metafiction uses parody along with popular genres and non-literary forms as a way not only of exposing the inadequate and obsolescent conventions of the classic novel, but of stuggesting the lines along which fiction might develop in the future.

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in the manner of Hitchcock, across a corridor at Watermouth University in The History Man. John Barth corresponds with his characters in Letters. He explains as ‘J.B.’ his role along with the computer WESAC in producing the novel Giles Goat-Boy (1966) in the first few pages of the novel. B. S. Johnson foregrounds autobiographical ‘facts’, reminding the reader in Trawl (1966): ‘I . . . always with I . . . one starts from . . . one and I share the same character’ (p. 9). Or, in See the Old Lady Decently, he breaks off a description in the story and informs the reader: ‘I have just broken off to pacify my daughter . . . my father thinks she is the image of my mother, my daughter’ (p. 27). Steve Katz worries in The Exaggerations of Peter Prince (1968) – among many other things – about the fact that he is writing the novel under fluorescent light, and wonders how even this aspect of the contemporary technological world will affect its literary products. Alternatively, novelists may introduce friends or fellow writers into their work. Thus, irreverently, in Ronald Sukenick’s 98.6 (1975) the ‘hero’ decides to seduce a girl and her roommate: ‘Besides the roommate is a girl who claims to be the lover of Richard Brautigan maybe she knows something. . . . I mean here is a girl saturated with Richard Brautigan’s sperm’ (p. 26). Federman, Sukenick, Katz and Doctorow make appearances in each others’ novels. Steve Katz, in fact, appeared in Ronald Sukenick’s novel Up (1968) before his own first novel, The Exaggerations of Peter Prince, had been published (in which Sukenick, of course, in turn appears). Vladimir Nabokov playfully introduces himself into his novels very often through anagrams of variations on his name: Vivian Badlock, Vivian Bloodmark, Vivian Darkbloom, Adam von Librikov (VVN is a pun on the author’s initials). Occasionally authors may wish to remind the reader of their powers of invention for fear that readers may assume fictional information to be disguised autobiography. Raymond Federman writes:

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Further Reading

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Index

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Metafiction

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Index 175

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Metafiction

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