The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for the term “metafiction” – “Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions” – emphasizes the form's dependence on established artistic norms and, through later invocations of naturalism and postmodernism, its short pedigree. Indeed, the bestknown studies of metafiction in English have focussed on works published during the last century or so. As a consequence, metafiction is often construed as a relatively recent response to the shopworn conventions of realism. Patricia Waugh, for instance, has described metafiction as deliberately countering the expectations established by traditional fiction through its “opposition … to the language of the realistic novel.” However, the notion that metafictive play is the twentieth century's cheeky challenge to the hegemony of the realist novel is complicated by numerous examples of metafictional experimentation before the advent of “realist imperialism.” Waugh admits that postmodernism's “formal techniques seem often to have originated” from eighteenth-century predecessors (23–24), and Linda Hutcheon likewise acknowledges “the novel's early self-consciousness.” Nonetheless, both Waugh and Hutcheon concern themselves largely with twentieth-century works that respond to the nineteenth century's “reification of … a temporally limited concept of ‘realism’ into a definition of the entire genre” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 94).