Do you like adventure stories full of sword fights, friendship and romance? Then you have definitely watched the 1987 movie The Princess Bride. But did you know that before being a movie, it was a book, published in 1973 under the title The Princess Bride – S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure?
This novel is definitely not your normal novel of adventure and romance. William Goldman takes his readers on a journey where the author is not the author, the narrator is a character of his own story, and what is invented is the reality.
This essay invites the reader to discover the genre of meta-fiction and travel through the novel’s various levels of narration and stories.
Extract:
« The Princess Bride is a 1973 novel the full title of which is The Princess Bride – S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure. As early as the book’s cover, we are faced with one major question: who is Morgenstern? And consequently, how can this novel be his if the author is William Goldman? These two initial questions are the red thread of a reflection on the genre of meta-fiction and the role of the narrator in a literary text.
Although this novel is generally classified as a comedy, romance and fantasy novel, it also belongs to another, lesser known, literary genre: the meta-fiction. Meta-fiction is a genre that refers to itself, in other words, it is self-referential fiction. The best known example of meta-fiction novel is Cervantes’ Don Quixote, however, there is a type of postmodern meta-fiction that was quite in vogue during the seventies and eighties, the time during which Goldman was writing and publishing his novel. »
Page count: 10.
Word count: 4.643
Read the full essay here: Meta-literature: the full PDF.
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