Theory of Reflexive Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the development of reflexive theories of fiction, and of self-conscious fictional writing, under the Modernist and early Post-modernist aesthetic in the early and mid 20th century, as many sophisticated novelists and theorists turned away from the realist-mimetic aesthetic towards more formal concerns. The development of metafiction and reflexive narrative is associated to the higher formal consciousness associated to formalist approaches to art and literature, the New Criticism and Structuralism, so that self-conscious art might almost be termed "the structuralist aesthetic."

Keywords: Literature, Fiction, Metafiction, Writing, Novel, Self-consciousness, Reflexivity, Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, Postmodernism, Modernism, Aesthetics