the novel emerged as a form of literature in 1010.
when did the novel emerged as a form of literature?
1010
na
na
has it ever occurred to you that novelists are using up experience at a dangerous rate? no, i see it hasn't. well, then, consider that before the novel emerged as the dominant literary form, narrative literature dealt only with the extraordinary or the allegorical – with kings and queens, giants and dragons, sublime virtue and diabolic evil. there was no risk of confusing that sort of thing with life, of course. but as soon as the novel got going, you might pick up a book at any time and read about an ordinary chap called joe smith doing just the sort of things you did yourself. now, i know what you're going to say – you're going to say that the novelist still has to invent a lot. but that's just the point: there've been such a fantastic number of novels written in the past couple of centuries that they've just about exhausted the possibilities of life. so all of us, you see, are really enacting events that have already been written about in some novel or other.this scene from "the british museum is falling down" (1965) features several instances of metafiction. first, the speaker, adam appleby (the protagonist of the novel) discusses the change the rise of the novel brought upon the literary landscape, specifically with regards to thematic changes that occurred. second, he talks about the mimetic aspect of realist novels. third, he alludes to the notion that the capabilities of literature have been exhausted, and thus to the idea of the death of the novel (all of this is explicit, critical indirect metafiction). fourth, he covertly foregrounds that fact that the characters in the novel are fictional characters, rather than masking this aspect, as would be the case in non-metafictional writing. therefore, this scene features metafictional elements with reference to the medium (the novel), the form of art (literature), a genre (realism), and arguably also lays bare the fictionality of the characters and thus of the novel itself (which could be classified as critical, direct, fiction-centred metafiction).
metafiction