ABSTRACT
The postmodern predilection for metafiction leads Linda Hutcheon to misrepresent Aristotle by broadening the reference of the term. Metafiction deliberately foregrounds and explicitly thematizes the text’s fictional status and the reading experience; modernist or postmodernist word-play may defamiliarize, but is not generally designed to alienate in this pseudo-Brechtian manner. The literary forms favoured by poststructuralist theorists include the linguistic self-consciousness of modernist texts and the literary self-consciousness of postmodernism, both of which apparently subvert the conventions of ‘classic’ realism. The poststructuralists propose that metafiction confuses or collapses the ontological categories of word and world, fact and fiction. A cursory survey of major nineteenth-century novelists indicates the long-established accommodation of metafiction within literary realism. The most common metafictional device used in nineteenth-century fiction is the intrusive narrator and Jane Austen’s narrator can be extremely officious. Postmodern metafiction is misrepresented by poststructuralist theorists who are over-impressed by the metaphysical transgression of ontological boundaries.
