The Critical Reader in Children’s Metafiction

Scholarship on children’s metafiction has tended to praise metafiction for its subversive possibilities, but this paper argues that the potential for subversion is necessarily limited in children’s novels about the relationship between children and books. Using China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, the author emphasizes instead metafiction’s ability to open spaces for critical reading. This model of reading encourages evaluation and reevaluation of authority while leaving room for the affectionate relationship so often portrayed in stories of readers and their books.