Metafiction: Self - Reflexivity in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Abstract

Traditionally realistic novels, expected to mirror reality, acted as modals for creating and establishing the worth of any other novel. Since literature has been evolving pretty fast (mostly since 1930s),  so new trends and new genres have been invented by writers from time to time in order to refresh the exhausted literature. Metafiction is one such trend, one such narrative, one such genre which have taken literature to the zenith. This paper contends to show that metafiction works against the fictional illusion created by the realistic and traditional narrative which dominated literature mostly novel since ages. The paper seeks to study the metafictional elements in John Fowles, The French Lieutenant Woman (1969) and Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985). I would base my paper upon Patricia Waugh’s ideas which she demonstrated in her study about metafiction. Furthermore, in order to prove it, I would undertake John Barth’s essay, ‘The literature of Exhaustion’ and ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ to prove my point. Through this study I would lay bare the conventions of realism and realistic literature and would show how metafiction breaks this fourth wall and explicitly draws reader’s attention towards its self - reflexivity, towards its artificiality, towards its fictionality.