closure. Implied readers are thereby positioned in more active interpretive roles. By
foregrounding the discursive and narrative structuring of texts, metafictions can show
readers how texts mean and, by analogy, how meanings are ascribed to everyday reality.
Metafiction and ReadersAlthough the use of metafictive and experimental narrative forms in children’s fiction
has recently received positive criticism (Moss 1985; Lewis 1990; Moss 1990, 1992; Hunt
1992; Stephens 1991, 1992b, 1993; Mackey 1990), the genre can still generate
resistance and scepticism. A common response is that it is too difficult for, children.
Metafictive texts often draw attention to their own artifice through the parody or
inversion of other texts, genres and discourses. These strategies depend upon a reader’s
recognition of the parodied text, genre, or discourse, and hence assume certain levels of
literary and interpretive competence. As inexperienced readers, children may not have
learned the cultural and literary codes and conventions necessary to recognise
metafictive devices. However, as Hunt has observed ‘it may be correct to assume that
child-readers will not bring to the text a complete or sophisticated system of codes, but
is this any reason to deny them access to texts with a potential of rich codes?’ (1991:
101). Furthermore, Mackey argues that metafictive children’s texts can ‘foster an
awareness of how a story works’ and implicitly teach readers how texts are structured
through specific codes and conventions (1990:181).
The instructive potential of metafiction has been emphasised by many theorists (of
both adult and children’s texts). Hutcheon’s description of the activity of a reader of
metafiction also aptly describes the activity of an inexperienced child reader: that is,
‘one of learning and constructing a new sign-system, a new set of verbal relations’ (1980:
19). By involving readers in the production of textual meanings, metafictions can
implicitly teach literary and cultural codes and conventions, as well as specific
interpretive strategies, and hence empower readers to read more competently: more
explicit forms often seek to teach readers conventions and strategies with which to
interpret metafictions as well as other more closed texts.
There are two main aspects of metafiction which are important for reading
development. First, developmental studies suggest that mature readers ‘read with a
more reflective and detached awareness of how the processes of fiction are operating as
they read’ (Mackey 1990:179). Metafictive narratives construct a distance between an
audience and the represented events and characters and can potentially foster such an
awareness (Stephens 1991:75). Second, there is a demonstrated relationship between
play-oriented activities, such as verbal puns, jokes and rhymes, role play and story-
telling, and the acquisition of language and of complex cognitive and social skills
(Vygotsky 1934/1962; Britton 1970/1972). Underlying much metafiction for children is
a heightened sense of the status of fiction as an elaborate form of play, that is a game
with linguistic and narrative codes and conventions. Janet and Allan Ahlberg exemplify
this kind of writing for quite young children, by producing narratives which are parodic
reversions of familiar childhood texts (for example Allan Ahlberg’s Ten in a Bed (1883).
A second objection to metafiction (for children and adults) is that as a radically self-
reflexive and playful genre it is ultimately self-indulgent and solipsistic. To assume that
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