SOURCE: Hite, Molly. “(En)gendering Metafiction: Doris Lessing's Rehearsals for The Golden Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 3 (fall 1988): 481-500.

In the following essay, Hite examines the origins of Lessing's metafictional The Golden Notebook.

Metafiction—fiction that is in some overt way about fiction—is one of the few literary genres that has managed to provoke and sustain controversy throughout its history.¹ Not merely individual works of metafiction, but metafiction itself is regularly stigmatized or applauded as “subversive,” to the point where subversion might be called its defining feature. But the subversion presumed to be inherent in the form is equivocal, on one hand implying an undermining of authority cogenial to, if not identical with, political radicalism, and on the other hand suggesting a preoccupation with formal features of the text that would seem to subsume politics to a sort of latter-day aestheticism. For example, in a recent review...