Hard-to-Google Lit. Crit. Queries...

[steepholm]

Is there a general term for novels (or other fictions) that contain/mention themselves? I mean, the novel is called The Book of Glum, and it's about someone who turns out to be writing or reading a book called The Book of Glum, or we're at least given to know that this is a world where The Book of Glum already exists?

Also, is there decent existing discussion (in journals or elsewhere) of this phenomenon?

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

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.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I can't answer the query, but am busy trying to think of other examples of the same phenomenon. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy leapt to mind immediately, and M.R. James' short story 'The Tractate Middoth' also presented itself after some thought. But then I got stuck. I'm sure there must be plenty more along the lines of the latter in particular, though, in which the titular book serves as an object of quest and / or a portal into another world. If no established term exists for the phenomenon, could we simply call them autoreferential?

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Repeating from a nested comment by way of hoping for more information myself:

Yes -- I've been looking for a term, or for some narratological account, of the very simple distinction between first person fictional worlds where what you read can be found (e.g. epistolary novels, journal novels, etc.) and where it can't. Sometimes you don't know you're in the former until late: e.g. Double Indemnity, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night.

Also: A Hundred Years of Solitude.

And Javier Marías does this intertextually: (sometimes repeating) characters from his novels... interlexically read the novels other characters appear in, who read the novels they appear in.

I feel that John Sutherland might now the answer to this. He has a neat piece on stories where the author is mentioned as a minor character. Martin Amis has a novel where someone notices "that asshole Martin Amis" at another table. And Billy Pilgrim briefly runs into Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In The Gunslinger a character has a weird experience that reminds him of "that movie The Shining," which of course Stephen King hated.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

It is possibly a measure of my lack of intellectual street cred that the first example of this phenomenon that sprang to mind was Where's My Cow? by Terry Pratchett. :)

[ven crane (from livejournal.com)]

I'm wondering if there is a TVtropes page for this. (talk amongst yourselves while I go and look at TV Tropes) There is one for the Droste Effect, a picture which contains itself and mise en abyme is mentioned but I can't find a specific page -- it would help if we had come up with a definitive term however.

I started wondering about TV Tropes because I was thinking about "Extras", which is so recursive it makes my head hurt.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Laurie King's The Art of Detection might fit somewhere around the foothills here. In that book, "The Art of Detection" is a manuscript allegedly by Doyle, narrated by Holmes himself, 100 pages, which is embedded in full in King's novel. Whether that's 100 yellowed typewriter ms pages, or 100 pages in King's novel, I'm too lazy to look up.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I bought a bunch of John M. Ford's books recently, and discovered that his The Final Reflection (a Star Trek novel) has a framing story in which McCoy tells Kirk to read The Final Reflection.