Encounters with Metafiction

In this chapter, the idea of intergenerational play is considered in relation to the socially-constructed and often invisible assumptions about literacy that give shape to how parents read with their young children. Drawing on the findings of a recently completed doctoral study ¹ that inquired into the literacies practised when an intergenerational group of readers encountered the playful and deliberately disruptive demands of metafiction in picturebooks, I describe how interacting with such texts enabled some adult readers to become more reflectively aware of literacy as a “selective tradition” (Luke 16), and encouraged them to reconsider pre-existing ideas about how books should work, or what mattered to them while reading. Here, the concept of intergenerational play is used to describe the ways that parent participants started to toy with taken-for-granted notions about reading that were suddenly (and surprisingly) made visible by the effects of metafiction. At the same time, I suggest metafiction’s potential as an “engaging ally” (Mackey 186) in the drive to develop more critically literate citizens on both sides of the classroom walls.