AustLit

The study takes as its focus four recent young adult texts that incorporate the mode of historiographic metafiction both implicitly and explicitly through a variety of narrative strategies. The historiographic metafictive texts selected for this study problematise history and fiction in a range of ways. The mode functions as a device for examining the ideologies and tropes of young adult fiction, and specifically the discursive representation of history within this genre. Further, it allows an exploration of the fluidity of meaning by incorporating and problematising discourses of history and fiction, truth and reality, adolescence and adulthood. The analysis demonstrates that historiographic metafiction in young adult literature both strengthens and destabilises tenets of humanism, which results in an emphasis on liminal spaces.