Mutinous Fiction: Narrative and Illustrative Metalepsis in Three Postmodern Picturebooks

Narrative embedding is a common narrative structural device. Genette (1980, 1988) distinguished among various diegetic levels to explain the discrete narrative levels in embedded narratives and he defined metalepsis as the deliberate disturbing or breaking of narrative boundaries. Metalepsis, described by Malina (2002) as a mutinous narrative device, increases narrative complexity by obscuring or collapsing the boundaries between reality and fiction. She also stated that, “artistic exploitation of metalepsis has run rampant in the postmodern era” (p. 1). This essay focuses on three postmodern picturebooks and discusses how the various metaleptic transgressions in these selections create multifaceted and mutinous texts.