A critical introduction of Patricia Waugh's theories about metafiction

As one of the earliest western theorists to give systematic interpretations of metafiction,Patricia Waugh has summarized the characteristics of metafiction as follows: a celebration of the power of the creative imagination together with an uncertainty about the validity of its representations;an extreme self-consciousness about language,literary form and the act of writing fictions;a pervasive insecurity about the relationship of fiction to reality;a parodic,playful,excessive or deceptively naive style of writing.She has also discussed the self-consciousness of metafiction on three levels,that is,the consciousness about frame,play,and the nihilistic viewing of rerality as artefact.Furthermore,her analysis of the sliding scales of metafiction has helped to change prejudice against it and made more objective evaluations.