The book Metafiction by researcher Yael Shilick, recently published by the Kalima Translation Project under the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, translated by Dr Ahmed Khurais, sheds light on one of the most prominent narrative trends in postmodern literature, offering Arab readers a scholarly entry point into this field.
The book explains that metafiction is a mode of narrative writing that does not merely construct a fictional world, but also reveals the mechanisms of its formation and comments on them from within the text itself.
It describes how this trend, since the 1970s, became one of the most distinctive features of contemporary literature, relying on techniques such as parody, embedding, and intertextuality.
The book also surveys its applications in a number of works that have reshaped the relationship between author, text, and reader, tracing the evolution of metafiction as a tool for rethinking the function of literature and its capacity to interrogate itself, and to engage with intellectual, social, and political issues from a fresh aesthetic perspective.