Explicit use of metafictional technique, as Waugh describes it, stems from modernist questioning of consciousness and reality. Patricia Waugh further comments that, “contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of external verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures” ( 7). Devotees claim that other genres have undergone the same critical self-reflexivity and that the definition of the novel itself “notoriously defies definition” (Waugh 5). Critics of postmodern metafiction claim that it marks the death or exhaustion of the novel as a genre, while advocates argue that it signals the novel’s rebirth. Gass wrote an essay in which he dubbed the novel’s self-reflexive tendency “metafiction” (Waugh 2). Although implicit in many other types of fictional works, self-reflexivity often becomes the dominant subject of postmodern fiction.
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