List of metafictional works
Metafiction is a form of fiction in which the text - either directly or through the characters within - is 'aware' that it is a form of fiction.
This is a partial list of works using various metafictional ideas.
Novels, novellas and short stories
- Peter Ackroyd, English Music
- Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs
- Rabih Alameddine, I, the Divine
- Felipe Alfau, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures
- Martin Amis, Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow, The Information
- Isaac Asimov, Murder at the ABA
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
- Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986)
- Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
- John Barnes, One for the Morning Glory
- Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
- John Barth, Chimera, Coming Soon!!!, The Floating Opera, Lost in the Funhouse among others
- Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
- Samuel Beckett, Watt
- Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein's Nephew
- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths", "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" among others
- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
- Michel Butor, Second Thoughts
- Steven Brust and collaborators, the Paarfi books, especially Five Hundred Years After
- A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance
- James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres
- Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
- Peter Carey, Illywhacker
- Jonathon Carroll, The Land of Laughs
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
- J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man
- Douglas Cooper, Amnesia, Delirium
- Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
- Douglas Coupland, jPod
- John Crowley, Little, Big, "Novelty", Lord Byron's Novel, The Solitudes (first book of the Ægypt cycle)
- Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
- Peter David, Young Justice, Sir Apropos of Nothing
- Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection, Dhalgren, Return to Nevèrÿon (series)
- Philip K. Dick, VALIS, The Man in the High Castle
- Joan Didion, Democracy
- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, The Name of the Rose
- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
- Harlan Ellison, "The Deathbird"
- Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
- Steve Erickson, "Arc d'X", The Sea Came in at Midnight
- Raymond Federman, Twofold Vibration, Smiles on Washington Square, Take It Or Leave It
- Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear
- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
- Cornelia Funke, Inkheart trilogy
- Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
- John Gardner, October Light, Grendel
- William H. Gass, The Tunnel
- André Gide, The Counterfeiters
- William Goldman, The Princess Bride
- Alasdair Gray, Lanark
- Robert Grudin, Book: A Novel
- Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts
- Larry Heinemann, Paco's Story
- Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast and Glory Road, at least.
- Douglas Hofstadter, dialogues in Gödel, Escher, Bach
- James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
- Marek S. Huberath, Nest of Worlds (Gniazdo światów)
- Rhys Hughes, Nowhere Near Milk Wood, The Postmodern Mariner, The Less Lonely Planet
- B S Johnson, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry
- Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock
- Stephen King, The Dark Tower, Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones
- Michael Muhammad Knight, Osama Van Halen
- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
- Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
- David Lodge, Therapy, Nice Work
- Dimitris Lyacos, Nyctivoe
- Steve Lyons, Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures:Conundrum
- Barry N. Malzberg, Galaxies, Herovit's World
- Yann Martell, Life of Pi
- Carole Maso, The Art Lover
- Ian McEwan, Atonement
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
- Spike Milligan, Puckoon
- Walter Moers, The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear, Ensel und Kretel, The City of Dreaming Books
- Michael Moorcock, The Second Ether sequence (Blood, Fabulous Harbours & The War Amongst The Angels)
- Ethan Mordden, The Buddies Cycle
- Toni Morrison, Jazz
- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
- Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, Pale Fire, Look at the Harlequins!
- Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
- Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
- Juan Carlos Onetti, El Pozo
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Diary, Haunted
- Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight
- Milorad Pavić's novels.
- Daniel Pellizzari, Dedo Negro Com Unha
- Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas
- Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
- Robert Rankin's novels
- Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Jalousie, La maison de rendez-vous
- Philip Roth, Operation Shylock
- Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
- Douglas Rushkoff, Exit Strategy
- José Carlos Somoza, The Athenian Murders
- José Saramago, Blindness, The Cave, The Double
- Robert Sheckley, Options
- Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower
- Dan Sleigh, Islands
- Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), A Series of Unfortunate Events (13 book series)
- Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
- Peter Straub, In the Night Room
- Jonathan Stroud, The Bartimaeus Trilogy
- Janet Tashjian, The Gospel According to Larry and Vote for Larry
- J. R. R. Tolkien, Leaf by Niggle
- Roderick Townley, The Great Good Thing
- Terry Pratchett, several of the Discworld, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
- Aritha van Herk, Restlessness
- Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla
- Jeff Vandermeer, City of Saints and Madmen
- Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men The Broom of the System
- H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay
- Colin Wilson, The Personality Surgeon
- Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, the Illuminatus! trilogy
- Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, The Powerbook, 'Gut Symmetries'
- Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Book of the New Sun "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story" among others
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
- Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance
- Ryukishi07, Umineko no Naku Koro ni, Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru
Animated short films
Stage plays
- Francis Beaumon, The Knight of the Burning Pestle
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- Joseph Heller, We Bombed in New Haven
- Daniel MacIvor, Never Swim Alone and This Is A Play
- Arthur L. Kopit, End of the World With Symposium to Follow
- Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
- Ira Levin, Deathtrap
- Dimitris Lyacos, Nyctivoe
- Steve Martin, Picasso at the Lapin Agile
- Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
- William Shakespeare,Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
- Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade)
- Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth
- Doug Wright, I Am My Own Wife
- Federico García Lorca, Play Without a Title / Untitled Play (1935)
Films
Television shows
Comic strips, comic books and graphic novels
- Berke Breathed, Bloom County
- Penny Arcade frequently features metafiction, particularly their fantasy setting Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga, which has a detailed wiki devoted to it.
- Grant Morrison's runs on Animal Man and Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo, The Filth, and more recently, Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis. Elements of metafiction can be found in a great deal of Morrison's comics work. Metafictional aspects are especially prominent in The Invisibles, a series Morrison has described as a hypersigil designed to effect positive change in the reader's (and writer's) life.
- Dave Sim, chapters "Minds" and "Guys" from his six thousand pages graphic novel Cerebus.
- The Marvel Comics supervillains Deadpool and Purple Man are both aware they are in a comic book.
- John Byrne's run on The Sensational She-Hulk and Dan Slott's run on She-Hulk.
- The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama is fiction with a metafictional history.
- The Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew.
- Claudio Sanchez's Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Vol. 1, first half of the fourth chapter of The Amory Wars presents a metafictional aspect to the story when The Writing Writer goes into the story to persuade the main character to accept his destiny.
- Alan Moore's Promethea, Supreme and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
- Kristofer Straub's Checkerboard Nightmare, portrayed as the workplace of several professional webcomic actors and marketers.
- Triangle and Robert is heavily metafictional.
Artists' books