metafiction

noun

1. (uncountable, usually)A form of self-referential literature concerned with the art and devices of fiction itself.

   “Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Chatterton may be described as accomplished examples of historiographic metafiction, the kind of self-conscious, heavily parodic and experimental historical […]”

   “In the previous chapter, I presented a heuristic explanation of the development of metafiction. In this chapter, I turn to some texts written before the 1980s to demonstrate that the binary between realism and metafiction is not fixed.”