Metafiction

Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that reminds the audience it is reading or viewing a fictional work, remaining self-conscious about language, literary form and storytelling; works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their own status as artifacts, often as a form of parody or a means of exploring the relationship between literature and reality. Although most closely associated with the postmodern literature that developed in the mid-twentieth century, its techniques can be traced to much earlier works, including Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote Part Two, and Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The genre became particularly prominent in the 1960s in works such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Since the 1980s it has flourished in contemporary Latino literature, including novels and stories by Junot Diaz, Sandra Cisneros and Carmen Maria Machado, and its techniques have extended beyond prose fiction into other media, including the self-referential video game The Stanley Parable.