The Routledge Companion to Metafiction

The Routledge Companion to Metafiction examines metafiction’s history and trajectory and identifies its impact across all media and levels of culture. Far from representing metafiction as a self-enclosed hermeneutic project of high postmodernism, the collection foregrounds metafiction’s engagement with politics, history, culture, and identity across various points in literary time. The volume examines metafiction in a variety of genres and fields, such as graphic novels, poetry, film, children’s literature, video games, Indigenous storytelling, critical and queer theory, and more. Collectively, the chapters enrich and broaden existing scholarship while charting new directions for inquiry. At a time when popular culture increasingly embraces metafictional practices—from gaming to commercials to cartoons—the companion highlights the breadth of metafiction’s applications and theories, opens new pathways of research, and expands critical perspectives.