How to Use metafiction in a Sentence

metafiction

noun
  • No, don’t ever call my novels metafiction!
    — Literary Hub, 24 Nov. 2025
  • The show is not just a work of metafiction but an unsparing piece of self-criticism.
    — John Semley, The New Republic, 28 July 2022
  • But in Night Springs, the metafiction often felt more like a gimmick.
    — G Kirilloff, Forbes, 22 Oct. 2024
  • Even his nods to metafiction, a genre known for playing with form and defying traditions, feel pat.
    — Stephen Kearse, Washington Post, 17 July 2024
  • And how important is metafiction in shaping the novel’s meaning and impact?
    — Literary Hub, 24 Nov. 2025
  • But The Muppets’ earnest metafiction goes deep like Inception.
    — Scott Thill, WIRED, 10 Dec. 2011
  • This is really metafiction, with the author entering the text as a character.
    — Leo Robson, New York Times, 14 Apr. 2025
  • One critic even sees it as a subtle metafiction about the relationship between actual people and the people in books.
    — Michael Dirda, Washington Post, 25 Sep. 2019
  • By and large, though, in these two books Mina has mastered the intricacies of metafiction, not to mention edge-of-your-seat storytelling.
    — Paula L. Woods, Los Angeles Times, 23 May 2022
  • For Calvino, metafiction is a way of exploring the nature of reality and the ways in which stories can shape our perceptions of the world.
    — New York Times, 12 Apr. 2022
  • But Zambra’s incursions into metafiction, in which the author peeks in and winks at the reader, feel playful, serendipitous.
    — Los Angeles Times, 14 Feb. 2022
  • Like so many of Stoppard’s works in which historical figures come up against the playwright’s irrepressible love of ideas, Hnath’s script is a kind of metafiction.
    — Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 8 May 2017
  • Portuguese filmmakers of the post-democracy era advanced the forms of docufiction and metafiction to confront a new era’s injustices and the traumas of history.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 17 Oct. 2024
  • Or the experimental metafiction of Sharon Mashihi’s Appearances.
    — Vulture, 22 Sep. 2022
  • But the precision and control of the tales has given way in these pages to a shaggy-dog approach that’s part stream-of-consciousness, part apocalyptic conjuration, part analogy-laden metafiction.
    — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, 18 Apr. 2016
  • As Russia’s 2022 attack begins, a kidnapping plot, a left turn into metafiction, and a race to save a singular gastropod propel the tale.
    — Monitor Reviewers, Christian Science Monitor, 26 June 2025
  • Anchoring even his most arcane metafictions are recognizable characters who try to commit to a principle or an identity — and often fail spectacularly.
    — Dave Kim, New York Times, 2 Apr. 2024
  • Ingmar Bergman’s early-fifties soap commercials put daring methods—metafiction, animation, and even a 3-D parody—to comedic ends.
    — Hilton Als, New Yorker, 7 Nov. 2025
  • Mullins’ overgrown obsession with creepypasta and metafiction feeds on secrecy and modern subgenres of horror to make Inscryption a winding tale full of never-ending twists.
    — Joshua Khan, Wired, 26 Dec. 2021
  • Mike Tyson plays a space-cadet version of himself, but the show transcends the one-note premise with its smart deployment of sharp joke writing, stellar voice actors (including Norm Macdonald, who crushes as a pigeon with a drinking problem), and a heavy dose of metafiction.
    — Eric Vilas-Boas, Vulture, 18 Mar. 2026
  • As a metafiction about Clooney’s own Hollywood trajectory, Jay Kelly even dips into outright sentimentality, particularly in a Tuscan montage sequence that’s right out of Cinema Paradiso.
    — Scott Tobias, Vulture, 5 Dec. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'metafiction.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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