non-experimental writing for children lies in the audience positions constructed within
texts. As experimental and metafictive features become more superficial aspects of a
texts construction, and hence more conventionalised and formulaic, the range of
interpretive positions inscribed in texts become increasingly restricted. Many of the
techniques and strategies which I have described are not in themselves ‘experimental’ or
‘metafictive’, though they have the capacity to function in these ways when used in
combination either with each other, or with particular discursive and narrational
modes. Metafictive and experimental forms of children’s writing generally utilise a wide
range of narrative and discursive strategies which distance readers from texts, and
construct implied readers who are more actively involved in the production of meanings.
By drawing attention to the ways in which texts are structured and to how they mean,
metafictions can potentially teach readers specific codes and conventions and
interpretive strategies with which to read and make sense of other, more closed, fictions.
Furthermore, to the extent that we use language and narrative to represent and
comprehend reality, as well as to construct fictions, metafictions can, by analogy, show
readers how representations of reality are similarly constructed and ascribed with
meanings.
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404 TYPES AND GENRES