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Fiction that self-consciously draws attention to its own status as a constructed artifact — questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality. Metafiction does not simply have a story within a story; it interrogates the nature of storytelling itself. Examples: If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (“So it goes”), and Atonement by Ian McEwan.

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