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The novelty in typography coupled with narrative techniques has turned Bivatan (Tehran, 2008) into a quasi-metafiction, i.e. a story which explores the process of its own construction. While in Bivatan the author is supposedly trying to produce a metafictional effect, a closer investigation into the novel will prove this claim void. In fact, Amirkhani’s novel fails to step into the realm of postmodernism.

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This paper studies the concept of metafiction in Charmshir’s play Dastan-e door vaderaz-e safar-e sultan … be diyar-e farang (1998). Metafiction, as a result of an analytical perspective emerged first in modern novels, attempts to challenge the conventional frame of fictional reference to the reality of the external world as it is suggested in literary Realism. In this type of stories, narrative elements such as plot, character, time, and place are no longer representatives of imagined reality, but they in fact reflect a perpetual conflict between art and reality. However, it can be suggested that reality here is subordinated by the referents of the external world. Linguistically, metalanguage and poetic functions of drama would dominate its object language. The story then will be directed toward its narrative elements as well as its own process of creation. Adaptation and meta-historiographyare some of the other features of this style of writing stories which is associated with parody and irony. Charmshir’s play is not really a narrative of the king’s long journey to Europe;rather it is a challenge for the playwright to realize a metafictional probability in form of a postmodern drama. This play is an artwork about the process of building an alternative story and is a new exploration on narrative facts.The elements such as characters, structure, plot, the authority of the narrator, and the style of narrative are no longer the hidden parts of drama in the representation of the story and meaning;in fact, they are the story in itself. The foregrounding of language here is an ironic reference to literary and dramatic texts while it is a fictional device for fabricating history and manipulating data by which the reader expects to receive narrative information. This studyunravels new aspects of narrative structure in Iraniandrama using an analytic-descriptive approach.

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The ‘diachronic approach to narrative studies’ may take different directions, one of them being a typological research on narrative texts, and the other, a genealogical enquiry into the modern ways of storytelling as to see how they have historically originated from a certain group of folktales. Assuming, in the same vein, that some relics of Persian formulaic oral narration should have survived—through functional modification, or even obliteration— into the Iranian literary fiction, this article introduces just one instance of these Persian-folktale-specific formulae, drawn out from a bulk of more than 270 texts whose inscription dates back at least to 70 years ago. Then the question is whether the formula has completely vanished away, or simply alternated between a number of functions.

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To challenge the authority of Grand Narratives is a dominant feature of postmodernism and, naturally, postmodern writing. Amongst these grand narratives is History. Historiographic metafictional novels – as postmodern works of fiction – challenge the objectivity of History and reinterpret (or, better said, demystify) the historical record. The writers of these novels seek to show the multiplicity and textuality of history. Therefore, history in these works of fiction is a discursive construct and has an intertextual nature; and as a discourse it is constructed in and through language and is thus open to rewriting and recontextualization. The present paper examines two historiographic metafictional novels in both English and Persian literatures, namely, Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) and Hamidrezā Shāhābādi's Dilmāj (2006), in order to reveal the extent these novels have transformed the conventions of historical fiction.

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This research is investigating one of the most common types of postmodernism fictions named metafiction. This kind of writing including self-referential and disclosure techniques not only exposes fiction but also explores the word out of context. Patricia Waugh emphasizes on this kind of writing with using methods and techniques that metafiction’s writers used it to write a story about story. This paper is based on reviewing and criticizing a fictional work and it is written according to the library method. This research with scrutiny about metafiction’s general characteristics like: centrality of language, Framework, The story as an artifact, parody and ontological Metafiction’s nature, proceeding some writing techniques and methods that are hidden within this general component's. Then it criticizes Iranian metafictions. It has been concluded that the works that are described in the name of Metafiction in our country are far from the postmodernism’s escape, and precisely based on predetermined criteria and parameters, and the artificial and mechanical aspects of these stories conflict with the normal nature of postmodernism.