Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Butler, Octavia - Madelyn Jablon (essay date 1997)

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Madelyn Jablon (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: "Metafiction as Genre," in her Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature, University of Iowa Press, 1997, pp. 139-65.

[In the following excerpt, Jablon analyzes how Butler has transformed the science-fiction genre by subverting its standard formula with Parable of the Sower.]

Linda Hutcheon identifies detective fiction, fantasy, and erotic fiction as genres of metafiction. Although she omits science fiction from her list, it is included here, for it best exemplifies the self-reflexiveness resulting from the invention of an alternate reality. Furthermore, much of what Hutcheon says about fantasy literature is applicable to science fiction, a classification that is often considered a subgenre of fantasy. In these genres of covert diegetic self-reflexiveness, the "act of reading becomes one of actualizing textual structures." Because the reader is familiar with the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Ruth Salvaggio (essay date Summer 1984)
   2. Octavia Butler with Frances M. Beal (interview date March/April 1986)
   3. Sandra Y. Govan (essay date Spring-Summer 1986)
   4. Adele S. Newson (review date Summer 1989)
   5. Frances Bonner (essay date Spring 1990)
   6. Hoda M. Zaki (essay date July 1990)
   7. Octavia Butler with Randall Kenan (interview date Spring 1991)
   8. Orson Scott Card (review date January 1992)
   9. Michelle Erica Green (essay date 1994)
   10. Rebecca O. Johnson (review date February 1994)
   11. Elyce Rae Helford (essay date Summer 1994)
   12. Hoda Zaki (review date July 1994)
   13. Cathy Peppers (essay date March 1995)
   14. Jim Miller (review date February/March 1996)
   15. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (review date 31 March 1996)
   16. Octavia Butler with Stephen W. Potts (interview date November 1996)
   17. Madelyn Jablon (essay date 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Octavia Butler