Vanity, Vanity.

For many intellectuals in the late 1960s, God was dead and so was the novel. After the heyday of realism in the nineteenth century and the experiments of the modernists in the early part of the twentieth, it seemed as if there truly was nothing new to do in fiction. However, some writers proceeded to use this very situation as both subject and technique. The writers of metafiction, as it was called, wrote about the process of writing when there is nothing left to write about, and since all possible techniques had been used, they used all possible techniques to comment on the situation. This new metafiction, also called superfiction or surfiction by some, differed from self-reflexive fiction of the past — in which the author would comment on the story — in the postmodern assumption that reality is an artificial...