Metafiction in Classical Literature

Metafiction, the practice in fictional texts of displaying an awareness of their fictional status, highlighting it, or even exploring it after the manner of literary criticism, existed in ancient Greek and Roman literature. This book demonstrates by cumulative weight of examples the existence of metafiction in classical literature, and in so doing constitutes an 'archaeology' of the origins of metafiction in Western literature. Author Owen Hodkinson engages with a wide range of approaches to fiction and metafiction, and explores detailed examples or case studies from ancient texts. This book provides for the first time for classical and modern literature scholars a full definition of metafiction which uses the earliest metafictional texts in western literature as its examples rather than only modern novels, and the first general but detailed and theoretically-grounded discussion and definition of metafiction aimed at scholars and students of classical literature.