Metafiction:The Evolution of Self-Consciousness

As a main paradigm of the study of postmodernist fiction,metafiction is much discussed by critics nowadays.However,as a kind of self-conscious fiction,it experienced an evolution of three different but continuous stages in the Western literary arena:traditional,modernist and postmodernist fiction.With Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country as well as some traditional novels as case studies,the present article holds that there were seeds of selfconsciousness in traditional fiction,and that it was further developed in modernist fiction and reached its peak in postmodernist fiction.