Parody and metafiction: Virginia Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’

The present paper aims at vindicating the dimension where Virginia Woolf was more overtly «metafictional»: the practice of some of her short fiction. According to her, this was a new genre freed from the realist conventions that had modelled the novel from its inception as a literary form. Such an attitude is openly at work in «An Unwritten Nov-el » (1920), a short piece which parodies realism by laying bare the functioning of its con-ventions while opening the way to new fictional modes of understanding literature. «An Unwritten Novel » draws attention to itself and to its process of construction, laying bare its self-reflecting mechanisms which so ostensibly oppose realism. Key words: Metafiction, Virginia Woolf, short fiction. Although the cluster of features which are supposedly inherent to metafic-tional narratives have tended to be associated to what has come to be labelled as ‘postmodernism ’ – as Patricia Waugh has noted (1984: 5) – metafiction and its practice are as old as the novel itself: it is a tendency inherent to all nov-els due to the ‘dialogic ’ potential of the genre. To use Mikhail Bakhtin’