ABSTRACT
The term ‘metafiction’ is used to refer to fiction which self-consciously draws attention to its status as text and as fictive. It does this in order to reflect upon the processes through which narrative fictions are constructed, read and made sense of and to pose questions about the relationships between the ways we interpret and represent both fiction and reality (Waugh 1984:2). Although they are not interchangeable, there is considerable overlap between contemporary categories of metafiction and experimental fiction. Texts which are experimental are often also metafictive, and vice versa. As categories of fiction both are, to some extent, context bound, definable in relation to other forms of narrative fiction—the category ‘experimental’ changes through time, socio-historical context, and critical conceptions of what constitutes the mainstream. With children's literature this category can shift between ‘literary’ and popular, neither of which is exempt from experimentation, depending on which aspects of a text are the focus of attention: the discursive and stylistic techniques, narrative technique and structures, content, social, ideological, intellectual and moral concerns and so on.
