Metafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself. It may emphasize structural, formal, behavioral, or philosophical qualities, but most writers of metafiction are thoroughly aware of all these possibilities and are likely to have experimented with all of them…. [Consider] four works of metafiction by four American writers: John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme's City Life, Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants, and W. H. Gass' In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. All four of these books are collections of short pieces. This is not merely a matter of symmetry. When extended, metafiction must either lapse into a more fundamental mode of fiction or risk losing all fictional interest in order to maintain its intellectual perspectives. The ideas that govern fiction assert themselves more powerfully in direct proportion to the length of a fictional work. Metafiction, then, tends toward brevity because it attempts, among other things, to assault or transcend the laws of fiction—an undertaking which can only be achieved from within fictional form.
The four works chosen here are impressive in themselves: the products of active intelligence grappling with the problems of living and writing in the second half of the twentieth century…. Each of the four books, taken as a whole, emphasizes one aspect of metafiction which may be related to one of the aspects of fiction and criticism….
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