I once used the term "recursive novel" for this, but I found it impossible to make clear in others' minds a distinction between a novel which is itself supposed to be a text in its own imaginary world, like The Lord of the Rings or, in a slightly different manner, The Princess Bride, and what I meant by a recursive novel, which is a book which is about an entirely different book with the same title, e.g. The King in Yellow or The Throme of the Erril of Sherill.
Anyway, I'd suggest making a list of them - somewhere in print I have my old list - and looking up discussions of those individual books to see if anyone uses a name for the phenomenon.
(sorry, I keep thinking of more) There are detailed literary discussions of Tolkien's narrative voice, of who's supposed to be telling the tale and to whom, of which Verlyn Flieger's Interrupted Music is the most sophisticated, and I'm sure the same exists for other authors.
(and more) The most extensive example of recursiveness I can think of is one in which both referenced texts are 1) real and 2) cross-art. Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about a real Beethoven sonata known by that name, and Leos Janacek wrote a musical piece inspired by the Tolstoy story which he in turn also called "The Kreutzer Sonata"; confusingly, it's not a sonata but a string quartet.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-31 02:10 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'd suggest making a list of them - somewhere in print I have my old list - and looking up discussions of those individual books to see if anyone uses a name for the phenomenon.
(sorry, I keep thinking of more) There are detailed literary discussions of Tolkien's narrative voice, of who's supposed to be telling the tale and to whom, of which Verlyn Flieger's Interrupted Music is the most sophisticated, and I'm sure the same exists for other authors.
(and more) The most extensive example of recursiveness I can think of is one in which both referenced texts are 1) real and 2) cross-art. Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about a real Beethoven sonata known by that name, and Leos Janacek wrote a musical piece inspired by the Tolstoy story which he in turn also called "The Kreutzer Sonata"; confusingly, it's not a sonata but a string quartet.