Then Mark Weiss said,
><<Not exactly a new idea. Check out Henry Fielding.>>
Yeah but I think it's become more common, if not commonplace, since WWII.
Maybe it has to do with the rise of mass media and concomitant presence of
journalist as creator/actor-on-scene/narrator.
Also, it occurs to me that this blossoming of metafiction might in some
ways be a pre-cursor of the supposedly new genre known affectionately as
creative nonfiction, wherein the narrating self is often the narrative
subject. gabe
PS Metafiction is of course very different fr creative nonfiction, insofar
as you have overtly "fictional" characters are mixed with what seems to be
a believably real-world author (such as pooka's and the Good Fairy in the
case of AS2B) who rise up and attack the author who's using them. Tristram
Shandy is a good example, yes, but that reads, to my mind, more as a
faux-autobiography than anything else, an autobio being somethign governed
by a different set of conventions than metafiction. This is much too hasty
and muddled and I'm no good at crit-speak (who is?), so forgive the clumsy
heuristics.
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