Russian metafiction and global realisms

Book section : Chapter

Metafiction, also known as self-conscious fiction, is a narrative technique that forces readers to be aware that they are reading a work of fiction. From early critical approaches to metanarrative in literature to more recent enquiries into meta-descriptive strategies in historiography, metafiction has enjoyed significant critical attention. First fully conceptually explored in landmark studies by theorists in the 1980s, it was initially considered to be an almost exclusively twentieth-century and specifically postmodernist phenomenon. As the theory has developed, the geographical and chronological scope of the texts it aimed to describe has expanded, prompting a series of questions about metafiction's hidden pasts and locations. In Russia, metafiction flourished not only, predictably, in the 1990s (roughly in step with the late stage of literary postmodernist writing in anglophone fiction) but also in the middle of the nineteenth century, during the period associated with the rise of the realist novel. It was exactly this focus on realist poetics—and its supposed incompatibility with metafictional narratives—that caused previous historical accounts of metafiction as a global phenomenon to skip over the nineteenth-century Russian realist novel. This chapter focuses on metafiction's complex correlation with the Russian realist tradition, as a part of the larger global history of narratives that can be considered metafictional and realist at the same time. It charts the global rise of theories of metafiction from the 1980s to this day and applies these theoretical insights to review the timeline of the development of the Russian realist novel.

Authors: Vaysman, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Host title: The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms
• Pages: 603-622
• Series: Oxford Handbooks
• Place of publication: Oxford
• Publication date: 2024-11-19
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197610640.013.29
• EISBN: 9780197610671
• ISBN-10: 0197610641
• ISBN-13: 9780197610640
• Language: English
• Keywords: metafiction; metapoetics; realist novel; Russian literature; narrative theory; realism
• Subtype: Chapter