Children’s Metafiction: Texts and Contexts

Abstract

As ‘children’s metafiction’ is the source text genre for adaptations under consideration, this chapter seeks to analyse it closely in order to suggest how it presents unique challenges to intermedial adaptation. The chapter is organized around the ‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ of children’s metafiction to determine what metafiction purports to be and to do for young readers. It presents the theory and criticism of metafiction specifically as they both apply to and are frustrated by the special conditions of children’s metafiction. It presents the paradox of children’s metafiction which requires a sophisticated and complex reading from emerging and young readers. It examines the phenomenon of a recent rise in volume of children’s metafictions and what that confirms about metafiction’s role in fostering literate readers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.