Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T03:38:14.025Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Part I - The Emergence of Market Metafiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2019

Paul Crosthwaite
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Get access

Summary

This chapter develops the book's argument that the postmodernist novel is defined by equally strongly felt imperatives to propitiate and renounce the market. It makes the case that, under these conditions, a degree of self-consciousness concerning a text’s market positioning – what the book defines as market metafiction – is always liable to arise. The chapter points to a series of examples of novels exhibiting this style of reflexivity, which demonstrate that recent texts in this mode give new visibility to techniques that have been evident in fiction for some decades. In the process, the chapter address four major – roughly historically sequential, though overlapping – tendencies in fiction shaped by the defining postmodernist double bind vis-à-vis the market. These are the "classic" or "high" metafiction of the 1960s and ’70s; the mid-’70s to mid-’90s phenomenon of “Avant-Pop” and related collisions of experimental and popular genre forms; the much-vaunted shift away from experimental postmodernism towards sincerity, “postirony,” and renewed forms of realism since the mid-1990s; and the widely discussed “genre turn” among “advanced” or “serious” novelists over the past decade.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×