Editing Metafiction (section)

== History of the term ==
The term 'metafiction' was coined in 1970 by [[William H. Gass]] in his book ''Fiction and the Figures of Life''.<ref name="auto1">{{Cite book|title=Fiction and the Figures of Life|url=https://archive.org/details/fictionfiguresof0001gass|url-access=registration|last=Gass|first=William H.|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf|year=1970|location=New York|pages=[https://archive.org/details/fictionfiguresof0001gass/page/24 24]–25|isbn=9780394469669 }}</ref> Gass describes the increasing use of metafiction at the time as a result of authors developing a better understanding of the medium. This new understanding of the medium led to a major change in the approach toward fiction. Theoretical issues became more prominent aspects, resulting in increased self-reflexivity and formal uncertainty.<ref name="auto1"/><ref name="auto2"/> [[Robert Scholes]] expands upon Gass's theory and identifies four forms of criticism on fiction, which he refers to as formal, behavioural, structural, and philosophical criticism. Metafiction assimilates these perspectives into the fictional process, putting emphasis on one or more of these aspects.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Fabulation and Metafiction|url=https://archive.org/details/fabulationmetafi0000scho|url-access=registration|last=Scholes|first=Robert|publisher=University of Illinois Press|year=1979|location=Chicago|pages=[https://archive.org/details/fabulationmetafi0000scho/page/111 111]–115}}</ref>

These developments were part of a larger movement (arguably a meta referential turn<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation|publisher=Rodopi|year=2011|editor-last=Wolf|editor-first=Werner|series=Studies in Intermediality 5|location=Amsterdam}}</ref>) which, approximately from the 1960s onwards, was the consequence of an increasing social and cultural self-consciousness, stemming from, as [[Patricia Waugh]] puts it, "a more general cultural interest in the problem of how human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience in the world."<ref name="auto">{{Cite book|title=Metafiction – The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction|last=Waugh|first=Patricia|publisher=Routledge|year=1984|location=London, New York|pages=3}}</ref>

Due to this development, an increasing number of novelists rejected the notion of rendering the world through fiction. The new principle became to create through the medium of language a world that does not reflect the real world. Language was considered an "independent, self-contained system which generates its own 'meanings.{{'"}}<ref name="auto"/> and a means of mediating knowledge of the world. Thus, literary fiction, which constructs worlds through language, became a model for the construction of 'reality' rather than a reflection of it. Reality itself became regarded as a construct instead of objective truth. Through its formal self-exploration, metafiction thus became the device that explores the question of how human beings construct their experience of the world.

Robert Scholes identifies the time around 1970 as the peak of experimental fiction (of which metafiction is an instrumental part) and names a lack of commercial and critical success as reasons for its subsequent decline.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Fabulation and Metafiction|url=https://archive.org/details/fabulationmetafi0000scho|url-access=registration|last=Scholes|first=Robert|publisher=University of Illinois Press|year=1979|location=Chicago|pages=[https://archive.org/details/fabulationmetafi0000scho/page/124 124]}}</ref> The development toward metafictional writing in postmodernism generated mixed responses. Some critics argued that it signified the decadence of the novel and an exhaustion of the artistic capabilities of the medium, with some going as far as to call it the '[[death of the novel]]'. Others see the self-consciousness of fictional writing as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the medium and a path that leads to innovation that resulted in the emergence of new forms of literature, such as the [[Historiographic metafiction|historiographic novel]] by [[Linda Hutcheon]].

Video games also started to draw on concepts of metafiction, particularly with the rise of [[indie game|independent video games]] in the 2010s. Games like ''[[The Magic Circle (video game)|The Magic Circle]]'', ''[[The Beginner's Guide]]'', and ''[[Pony Island]]'' use various techniques as to have the player question the bounds between the fiction of the video game and the reality of them playing the game.<ref>{{cite magazine | url = https://www.wired.com/2016/01/metafiction-games/  | title=  The Best New Videogames Are All About ... Videogames | first=  Julie | last =Muncy | date = 18 January 2016 | accessdate = 19 November 2021 | magazine = [[Wired (magazine)|Wired]] }}</ref>