The metafictional novel: A comparative study

My basic aim is to explicate and illumine the metafictional novel through a comparative study of six authors and a sustained consideration of contemporary theory. In the first chapter I establish a theoretical framework for understanding metafiction in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel (as elaborated in The Dialogic Imagination) and the poststructuralist theories of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In the following chapter I examine the origins of the metafictional novel in two early masterpieces, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The third chapter is a discussion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien Anos de Soledad and John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor as exemplars for a brand of parodic, pseudohistorical metafiction which is heavily indebted to Don Quijote. In the final chapter I discuss the ludic, deconstructive and postmodernist propensities of Julio Cortazar's Rayuela and Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association.