Metafiction is a relatively recent entry into the arena of literature. This "new fiction" may be defined as fiction--imaginative invention in prose writing--which takes fiction as its subject and literary foregrounding as its method in order to examine the relationship between fiction and reality. Accordingly, metafiction overturns mimetic art theory and practice, literary realism, and referential language.; "Authorial Presence in American Metafiction" is a critical examination of American metafiction from the mid 1960s to the present. In metafiction the author intentionally, consciously, and self-consciously makes himself present in his writing. Indeed, authorial presence is a major--of not the major--element distinguishing American metafiction from conventional realistic fiction and also characterizing it as imaginative invention. This presence is strongly apparent in three areas: first, subject matter--language, fiction, the invention and/or writing of fiction, and fictional systems; second, form; and third, voice/persona. "Authorial Presence" discusses this thesis in relation to four representative authors of American metafiction: Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick.; Literary foregrounding, which makes authorial presence conspicuous, forms the very hallmark of metafiction. The four writers demonstrate a wide spectrum in its specific strategies. Thus some metafiction employs literary realism but employs it differently than traditional realistic fiction does. For example, it uses the elements and conventions of the realistic novel but alters them in some way, such as by exaggerating them. Other metafiction uses literary realism but adds components foreign to realistic fiction. For instance, it joins the realistic novel to one or more other literary forms with their particular verbal styles. Still other metafiction departs from literary realism altogether and builds itself entirely from its own distinctive elements and conventions. For example, it utilizes the physical and visual properties of words.; Coover, Federman, Sorrentino, and Sukenick--and other metafictionists with them--employ the strategies of literary foregrounding to produce fiction of artist and artifice. These authors, inventing from both the old and the new, proclaim and extol the creativity, power, and infinity of the human imagination.
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