Metafiction

Robert Scholes writes in Elements of Literature: 4

Fiction is not reality but the illusion of reality. The writer of fiction is a verbal magician whose aim is to deceive us into accepting a collection of words as the equivalent of actual experience. In recent years this deception has weighed on the consciousness of certain writers to such an extent that they have felt obliged to write about it. Rather than decieve their readers by pretending to tell them what is true, these writers hope to make their readers aware of the truth about the deception that is fiction. We call such writing about fiction in the form of fiction "metafiction".

Thinking about the deceptions of fiction, the writer of metafiction is often led to ask what isn't fiction. When we are truly ourselves, truly authentic? One answer seems to be: when we are posing, telling stories, making fictions. The writer of metafiction is like the man from Crete in the famous philosophical puzzle who said, "All Cretans and liars." If he was telling the truth, he wasn't - and if he wasn't, he was.

[...]

The rise of metafiction as a worldwide movement in recent years should be seen in relation in developments in other kinds of fiction as well. The return of the fabulators of fairy tale is a sign of the same interest in the roots and processes of story telling.

[See description of Arabian Nights] [...]

In the last analysis, fabulation, realism, and metafiction are ways of reading, resources for the reader as well as the writer.[...]

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