Narrative Metafiction in Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises, Tanushree Podder’s Escape from Harem, and Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna Key

Abstract

This article focuses on the representations of metafiction in Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises(2000), Tanushree Podder’s Escape from Harem (2013), and Ashwin Sanghi’s The Krishna Key(2012). More specifically, the article will tackle metafiction in these works from a narrative point of view. The study will generally deal with metafiction as self-reflexive genre dealing with narrative devices, including the work’s comments on itself as a work of fiction. In this respect, the study is going to approach the narrative elements of the selected works to examine the effect of metafiction in the context of the selected works and how they provide the reader with their complex narrative fabric. Therefore, three main metafictional devices are going to be utilized in the study i.e., the self-reflective devices, the mimetic devices, and the narrative devices. These devices will be elaborated in the light of Patricia Waugh’s metafictional arguments. Consequently, a narrative conceptual framework will be followed to analyze the selected works’ plots.