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Item Metafiction in New Zealand from the 1960s to the present day : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2011) Harris, MatthewWhile studies of metafiction have proliferated across America and Europe, the present thesis is the first full-length assessment of its place in the literature of New Zealand. Taking as its point of reference a selection of works from authors Janet Frame, C.K. Stead, Russell Haley, Michael Jackson and Charlotte Randall, this thesis employs a synthesis of contextual and performative frameworks to examine how the internationallyprevalent mode of metafiction has influenced New Zealand fiction since the middle of the 20th century. While metafictional texts have conventionally been thought to undermine notions of realism and sever illusions of representation, this thesis explores ways in which the metafictional mode in New Zealand since the 1960s might be seen to expand and augment realism by depicting individual modes of thought and naturalising unique forms of self-reflection, during what some commentators have seen as a period of cultural ‘inwardness’ following various socio-political shifts in the latter part of 20th century New Zealand.Item Infinite regress : metafictional memoir : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in English at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand(Massey University, 2011) Rawson, Christopher JohnWriters like James Frey, author of the controversial work A Million Little Pieces, have shown aspiring memoirists the negative consequences of deliberately fabricating portions of a memoir. The question memoir writers now face: how much can an author add to or omit from a memoir before it risks betraying the reader’s trust in the author, which is essential to the proper functioning of memoir as a genre? I discovered I would be unable to produce a coherent or truthful memoir without fictionalising portions of it in a manner that could have subjected me to the same criticisms Frey faced. Because I did not want to produce a wholly fictional work but felt unable to reveal certain aspects of my true life in a straightforward memoir format, I instead made the problem of producing a truthful memoir the central focus of my work. My novella, Infinite Regress, uses metafiction to subvert the genre of memoir as an attempt to work around this issue of truthful self-representation. The analysis following Infinite Regress examines the characteristics of memoir as a genre, how reader response to memoirs hinges on readers being able to trust the memoirist, and the consequences of a memoirist breaking that trust. I then examine metafiction as a possible method of side-stepping the issue of truth in memoir; through use of metafiction, an author can deliberately draw a reader’s attention to the problematic nature of truth in any narrative. Finally, I demonstrate how metafiction does not ultimately represent a solution to the problem of truthful self-representation, and I determine that writing a memoir in a metafictional mode may only be preferable to not writing a memoir at all.