Representations of Authorship in the Postmodern American Novel

Self-fictionalizing novels, a paradoxical form of writing, at the same time autobiographic and fictional, as well as highly self-reflexive, exhibiting countless instances of the literary technique la mise-en-abyme, seems to be increasingly in vogue on the post-Postmodern literary scene at the beginning of the 21st century. If the tradition of authorial insertions in fictional texts can be traced back, through Borges and Nabokov, through the modernists, to Fielding and Sterne, and even further back to Don Quixote and Dante, it is in the postmodern arts where it seems to have flourished. John Barth is perhaps the most salient example of an author who has relentlessly produced this type of fiction, ¿in hopes of making art of of what I can¿t make sense¿, seemingly acknowledging the therapeutic potential of autofiction. The book provides an extensive analysis of 8 of his novels ¿ The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera, LETTERS, Once Upon a Time. A Floating Opera, The Book of ten Nights and a Night and Where Three Roads Meet ¿ explored from the unifying perspective of their author¿s self-fictionalization efforts.