Fiction that draws attention to and directly comments upon its status as fiction. Most often this takes the form of an intrusion of the ‘author’ into the work. One of the earliest and most celebrated cases of metafiction is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760—7), which has the author commenting frequently on his failure to get on with telling the story. But it can also take the form of a work of fiction about either the reading or writing of fiction, as one finds (again quite famously) in Calvino, Italo’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggatore (1979), translated as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1981). The device is more common in late twentieth-century fiction writing than it is in earlier periods and for this reason is often associated with postmodernism, although there is no direct correlation between the two. The device can also be witnessed in film and television. Further Reading: P. Waugh Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1988).